


The Second Future

by sigo



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: AU - Anna Karenina, Alternate Universe - Earth, Alternate Universe - Future, F/F, F/M, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-06-05
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:22:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 71,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24008791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sigo/pseuds/sigo
Summary: Functioning droids are each alike; every malfunctioning droid malfunctions in its own way.“Do you mean to stay in Moscow long?”“No, unfortunately,” said Hux, feeling for the first time that it was unfortunate. “My father is to be buried at the Academy in the south.” He had planned to cut his leave short and return to duty after the burial was complete, but looking at Ben now lit by the sun, all dark hair and pale skin and brown-gold eyes, Hux’s mind was occupied by the possibility of seeing him again.// Android Karenina Star Wars AU, heavily Kylux
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Ben Solo, Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Armitage Hux/Kylo Ren, Finn/Rey (Star Wars), Leia Organa/Han Solo, Poe Dameron/Finn, Poe Dameron/Finn/Rey
Comments: 9
Kudos: 30





	1. A CRACK IN SPACE

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, thanks for giving an AU a chance! Plot points are stolen and repurposed from Tolstoy, Marie de France style. Inspired by the fact that Domhnall Gleeson is in both Ex Machina and Anna Karenina. Un-beta'd, we die like men.

VENGEANCE IS MINE; I SHALL REPAY -- Unknown, graffiti along the grav-metro wall, year 6240 of documented humanoid life on planet Earth.

Functioning droids are each alike; every malfunctioning droid malfunctions in its own way. The same could be said of every sentient within the Organa household. Senator Leia Organa had discovered that her husband Han Solo was carrying on with his old smuggling operations against her express wishes, and that he had drawn their son, Ben, into the business. Enraged by the discovery, Leia had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house as him. The situation had now lasted three days and affected not only the wife and husband but their son and droids too. Ben Solo had taken the announcement harder than his father, and shut himself in his room, neglecting his maintenance of droids in the household. The Class 3s were keenly aware of their masters’ discomfort, but even the Class 2s stalled their duties. They seemed to sense that stray decoms from the distant reaches of the galaxy had more in common than they, the servomechanisms of the Organa household.

Han did not leave the first floor garage, and Leia had not been home those three days. Their 2/valet, badly mistuned, announced nonexistent visitors at every hour of the day and night in English rather than French or Russian. The 2/chauffeur drove one of their speeders up the stoop and through the durasteel front door, destroying an antique 1/horloge that had belonged to Leia’s adoptive parents, the late Tsar and Tsarina of Russia.

Three days after her domestic life had exploded, Tsarevna Leia Amidala-Skywalker Organa of Russia woke at eight o’clock sharp. She was known fashionably in the new Republic by her current profession as Senator Organa. Today she awoke not in her bed at home beside her husband but in her study within the Senate building at the very center of Moscow. She keyed open her climate-controlled Class 1 comfort unit. She had drifted back into consciousness to the rhythmic thumping of boots on every level of the tiered metal city. Squadrons of both the Senate’s peacekeepers and the First Order’s stormtroopers, running drills around each other as they had for years now. The Republic and the Order vied for power in the absence of _la monarchie_ . Sometimes, in her bleakest moments, Leia wondered whether she’d done the right thing in abdicating. _Our tireless protectors_ , Leia thought darkly, sliding out of her comfort unit and ordering the lights on.

Threepio, Leia’s Class 3 companion, strode into the room with a steaming cup of tea and her blinking comms unit. “Oh, good morning to you, Mistress Leia,” he said chirpily, as was his way. Leia found that she couldn’t face the communique yet and reached for the tea. She took a seat at her desk, beckoning Threepio to stand beside her. He obediently placed her comms unit on the desk and stood with his golden hands clasped at his front.

The desk’s surface was black durasteel embedded with a glowing map of the Republic. Leia set her tea saucer down on the capital city-state of Moscow, the seat of the Senate she had joined in a desperate effort to preserve the peace she spent her youth fighting for. The surrounding United Realms branched off from it on all sides. Territory borders were blue, grav-metro rails yellow. She had marked areas of recent dispute in red. The threat of the Empire was gone but this First Order worried her. There were rumors that the Order had begun hostile operations in space, although against exactly who or what, no one could agree. If she chose, Leia could lift the map off the desk with a wave of her hand and it would wrap itself around an invisible globe in the air, every landmark to scale. She could bring the red areas into sharp focus, magnify them for study. She often did. She refrained today, leaving the map to glitter ominously beneath her tea and comms unit.

“Thank you Threepio,” She eyed the droid fondly for a moment and then said, “I don’t see a way to go back to the way things were. Han’s not going to quit his dealings with the underbelly of the galaxy. Making credits off the gang leaders and mercenaries I’m working against every day in the Senate. This is breaking Ben’s heart.” The set of her face turned grim, “But I can’t abandon my principles.”

“Now, Mistress Leia, Master Han may yet see the error of his ways,” Threepio said, round eyes flashing expressively. Leia waved off the words of consolation. Threepio knew what she wanted of him, and it wasn’t comfort. He queued up her Memories of the fight and played them in a hologram for her to examine. She winced at Ben’s stricken face as he stood behind Han.

“What would you do, Threepio?” She asked, motioning for him to pass her the comms unit now. The Class 3’s faceplate contorted as much as it could in surprise and dismay.

The droid gave the answer Leia expected: “Oh, I haven’t the faintest idea.”

Leia gestured for the 2/tailleur to begin its functions – it laid clothes and shoes out on the office settee, examining her jewelry options and deciding on a necklace of silver squares, and then approached to groom her nails. She offered her left hand to the squat little droid with its little scissor and file end-effectors as she mused.

Leia Organa was an honest woman in her relations with everyone including herself. She wasn’t the type to tell self-consoling lies, and so she was incapable of pretending to repent the cruel words she had launched at her husband. All she regretted was that their fight had occurred in front of Ben, who, despite being a man nearing his thirtieth birthday, was remarkably sensitive and dreadfully alone. Ben spent more time with household droids than with people, having abandoned his studies for household mecanicien work in his teens. Yes, it would have been better to keep their latest quarrel away from him. His only friends were his younger cousin and by default the charming young ex-trooper who was inseparable from her every time she came to town.

Prompted by the thought, Leia told Threepio, “My brother and his daughter will arrive tomorrow, for Rey’s birthday celebration. Poe and Finn will join us in the festivities.”

Threepio understood the significance of this – Luke Skywalker and his progeny were both bright sources of light and love in demeanor, and they might bring some form of comfort and good cheer to her home. In addition, Leia had confided in her droid recently that her trusted confidante in opposition to the First Order, Poe Dameron, held both her niece and their ex-trooper friend in very high esteem, and had in fact already asked for Finn’s hand. A match between the two and Rey might be forthcoming. “Oh good,” the droid said emphatically, “It will be simply wonderful to see Mistress Rey again!”

As Leia opened her mouth to answer, the 2/tailleur let out a horrific screech and sank its nail scissors deep into the meat of her left index finger, sawing savagely. Leia shouted in shock and pain, flinching away into her high-backed chair and wrenching her hand from the droid’s grasp. Blood spurted out over the surface of her desk and down the front of her blue robe, staining it like a bruise. Denied its original target, the little droid shrieked again and lunged forward on its piston legs, arcing the scissors into Leia’s neck. It nicked her flesh and missed her carotid artery by a matter of inches.

Threepio, not a fighting unit but nevertheless a Class 3 programmed with the Iron Laws to defend his master past the point of his own destruction, grabbed the little Class 2 and hauled it away. It landed heavily on the glass top of the comfort unit, crashing through it. The little machine’s frame crumpled along with its interior components, and it burbled as it died.

Threepio summoned a medical droid to attend to Leia’s injuries. “I’ve never seen such a severe malfunction in a Class 2 before,” she murmured.

“Don’t worry, Mistress Leia,” Threepio told her, “I’ll have this unit recycled and procure a new one. Everything will be alright.”

Leia didn’t comment on Threepio’s optimism, instead saying, “I’ve got a lot to attend here ahead of Luke’s arrival. Someone’s got to prepare the house. Message the droids at home, would you? And Ben,” she added, “Since they likely need tuning.”

  
  


General Hux of the First Order cultivated a habit unique among modern society – at the age of 34 he remembered things in his head, without the assistance of his Class 3, like a child. He took deep, personal pride in doing without the hologram function of his droid. It kept his mind sharper. Of course, he loved Millicent. The cat-shaped Class 3 was curled in his lap, bright copper plates of her “fur” glowing dimly in the muted light of the grav-metro. He loved her companionship and her expressive amber-lamp eyes and her rumbling purr of a voice box. But he didn’t depend on her to keep stock of his life.

He mused over it now, as he often did on long journeys. Armitage Hux had not been possessed of a childhood or a normal home life. His mother he did not remember. She was listed as a scullery maid in official documentation. His father Brendol had been in his youth a brilliant officer and a respected society man. In his married life, Brendol had many love affairs notorious in the fashionable world. But only one child, illegitimate. His lady wife Maratelle had perished in childbirth along with the baby that might have been Brendol’s trueborn son. So, one illegitimate child to succeed him in the First Order military by way of the regimental Arkanis Academy, operated out of his late wife’s sprawling summer estate on the Sulis Coast, a terraformed community near Groznyy. And now one child to bury him.

Hux had left the Academy young and spent a year within the wealthy Arduin circles of society in what had been known as St. Petersburg in the days of the tsars. He then did a distinguished military tour of the planet and the galaxy, resulting in the eventual command of the starship _Finalizer_ as General. The youngest General in the First Order. He felt more at home on his ship, truly. It was cleaner. Binary. He returned now to Moscow and then to the Academy, and all the bustle and pretense of high society. He would inter Brendol Hux at Arkanis and then leave the grounds forever. Perhaps he’d burn them down. And then he would return to the Finalizer, and work himself to death, and a long line of Huxes would die with him. Marriage had of course presented itself to him as a possibility. He was young, attractive, successful. Wealthy. Hux had no use for marriage. He had no attraction to women, he disliked family life, and the idea of raising a child was alien to him.

Millie dug her tiny claws into his thighs, just enough to prick him out of his memory, and he realized his vitals must have indicated distress. “It’s quite alright,” he told her, stroking her. “I’d just like to get this over with.”

“That’s a beautiful Class 3,” the girl across the aisle from him piped up. She was young and fresh-faced, with dark almond eyes and a pert nose, and white teeth she was quick to flash in a broad smile. Her clothes were simple monastic robes, and her dark hair was pulled back. Her travelling companion resembled her except in age and eye color. An older relative then, likely father. And both religious. “I’m Rey,” she told him. “Are you stopping in Moscow too?”

“Yes,” said Hux, “Though not long.”

“It’s my birthday,” Rey said, barely able to contain her excitement. “I’m turning eighteen. I’ll have a Class 3 as well, soon. What’s yours named?”

Despite himself, Hux smirked. It wasn’t a smile, of course. Just a smirk. The girl’s mirth was contagious. “This is Millicent,” he said, unable to keep his pride from his voice. Upon being introduced, Millie opened her eyes and flickered them in greeting, stretching her body so that her copper fur-plates glittered, and giving Rey a rumbling purr.

Rey giggled, “Oh, she’s wonderful! Isn’t she, R2?” Her father’s battered little cylinder of a Class 3 beeped in agreement. “Master, perhaps we could model my Class 3 after an animal?”

“We’ll discuss it after the ball,” Rey’s companion told her fondly.

“I wasn’t aware that Jedi had societal debuts,” Hux said. “Master…?”

“Luke,” the man reached across the aisle and gave Hux a firm handshake. “Luke Skywalker. We don’t, usually. My sister is Senator Organa, and she wouldn’t hear of her niece missing out on Moscow custom.”

“Ah, then I may see you in the coming week,” Hux said. “Senator Organa is deeply involved in talks with my military order. Our parties do not often see eye to eye, which results in a close working relationship.”

“You watch each other and wait for the other guy to shoot first,” Luke said bluntly. His eyes were vaguely amused. He chuckled. Hux joined him.

“Are you meeting anyone at the station?” Rey asked. “We’re meeting my cousin and he’ll take us to the Senate building to collect my aunt. That would be your first stop on First Order business, right? Please let us escort you there!”

“Oh,” Hux said, “Yes, that is my first stop. Not for a pleasant errand. I am signing my father’s death papers. And I should hate to trouble your family, Miss Skywalker.”

“Luke and Rey, please,” Luke said warmly. He cast a glance at his daughter, “And we won’t hassle you, but the offer stands.”

  
  


Ben drove to the Arduinna-Moscow Grav Station at eleven o’ clock. He descended the steps into the station, a green durasteel box topped with a transparent holo-panel lid which let daylight in and rendered it airy rather than oppressive. Strangers parted around him and his Class 3, Kylo Ren. The black droid matched Ben in height and build, which he knew made them a formidable pair. Ben openly regarded his physique as his only asset. He considered himself ugly – striking without beauty. He had abandoned flight school and then his Jedi studies in turn, and had lingered in the spaces between respectable careers in the years since. He had no grace in politics or business, exiting the social stratosphere as soon as he could. He had heard idle gossip over the years from Moscow’s socialites, as he fixed their droids, about ugly and unsuccessful people who had captured the attention of their betters. But Ben discounted these tales because he judged the world by himself, and he himself could not love anyone who was not beautiful and exceptional.

He was more comfortable around droids than people, most of all his beloved Kylo Ren. Though its faceplate was more of a helmet, with no means of expression, and it only spoke when Ben addressed it, Ben felt that his Class 3 was the only sentient that understood him. He’d gifted the droid with a long black robe, and at first glance, most strangers treated it like a human.

As one they entered the station, Kylo Ren hooded and Ben in his silver mecanicien’s jumpsuit. Leia would have admonished him into changing had she been home, and he relished the thought of embarrassing her with his appearance when he arrived at her office with his uncle and cousin in tow. “Look there,” Ben told Kylo Ren, “The station droids are out in droves, and there’s peacekeepers and troopers too. Koschei?”

Ben’s skin crawled at the thought of a koschei attack on the line. The name in Russian meant ‘deathless,’ used in reference to the monstrous creatures the Empire and now the scattered Separatists used to wreak terror on society. Surely Rey would be safe, she had Luke with her. Kylo spoke up, its voice box emitting a low metallic growl of a voice, “The 77s are scanning for koschei, yes. I do not believe they have found any today.”

Ben and Kylo Ren both stood a bit straighter as a 77 scanned them and beeped an affirmative before moving on. Blaring alarms suddenly sounded from their right – another cluster of 77s surrounded a skeletal peasant with ragged clothes. The man was protesting his innocence in patois. “There’s one, then. The Senate and the Order weren’t mistaken in sending officers here today.” Ben murmured to Kylo, who made a static noise of agreement. One of the station droids plucked a tiny wriggling koschei from the peasant’s coat, where it had been playing stowaway. The man recoiled from it with a shout. It wriggled in the droid’s grasp, a horrible little bug-machine with too many legs. The 77s tossed it in a detonation chamber and the subsequent dampened boom sounded through the station. The holo-screens flashed with an announcement. The Grav was approaching and would not be delayed by the station droids’ execution of justice.

There was a flurry of motion and sound, of droids and people shuffling and talking, and of the grav-metro approaching. This was more a feeling than a sound – a susurrus accompanied by a raising of the hair on one’s arms as the vehicle docked, its magnetic railbed vibrating and arcing with pale blue flares of energy. Ben approached the door of the third carriage, only to find himself with two armfuls of his baby cousin before he could brace himself for the impact.

“Benny!” she squealed, “Oh we had the most pleasant ride here!” She gracelessly tumbled to her feet and turned back to the carriage, where Luke had just emerged. “You’re helping Mr. Hux with his bag?” she asked pointedly.

“Got ‘em all right here,” Luke said, waving three holocards to take to the baggage droids. He excused himself to do so, and a third person stepped from the carriage.

Ben felt as though his breath was knocked out of him for a second time. This stranger was tall – nearly of a height with Ben himself – but thin and elegant where Ben was bulky. The man stood regally, head high and shoulders back, spine straight. His hair was slicked back but the styling didn’t dull it. It flamed in the near-noon light. Ben found himself looking down the man’s body. He wore a wool greatcoat that masked his thinness to the casual observer. It hung off his shoulders as he hadn’t bothered with the sleeves. He was clad in a trim black sweater and form-fitting gray pants. There was a glowing orange hot-whip in its clear sheathe curled around his left thigh and a holster strapped around his right. Military, then. This was confirmed by his boots: black and polished First Order regulation. The man’s Class 3 wound around his boots, a sleek copper cat that complimented him perfectly.

He walked past Ben and waited patiently for Luke’s return. Ben felt at once that he must look at the man again. This time, he – Mr. Hux, Rey had said – returned the once-over. His pale green eyes gleamed between rows of copper lashes, though with what, Ben couldn’t decide. It was as though his nature were so brimming over with something that it showed itself in the flash of his eyes against his will, and he deliberately shrouded it as best he could. His Class 3 purred loudly and let off a golden glow between her plates, content to have arrived with her master. Her feline face allowed no expression and her voice box no speech, her form only accenting all that was remarkable about Mr. Hux as she traveled at his side.

“Isn’t she beautiful, Benny?” Rey said. “I told Master Luke on the trip that I’d like a Class 3 as beautiful as her! And Mr. Hux has been a wonderful travelling companion. I invited him to the Senate building with us. Wouldn’t that be grand?”

“Yes,” Ben said automatically, and then rushed to add, “Yes, it would be my pleasure to drive you along with us. Anyone who wins my cousin’s favor wins mine by default.” Ben made himself put out his hand, wishing desperately that he’d listened to his mind-voice of his mother after all and changed out of his jumpsuit. It wasn’t even a fresh one, the silver fabric smeared in places with black grease. “I’m Ben Solo,” he said. His own Class 3 stepped forward to stand at his side. “This is Kylo Ren.” Ben added.

“It’s quite the droid,” Hux said, his Arduin accent making Ben’s pulse quicken.

“You should see my father’s,” said Ben, wincing automatically when he thought of Han and Chewie. “It’s seven feet tall. Big droids are helpful when you work on mech. Kylo can lift anything.”

Hux took his hand, shaking it firmly. The leather of his gloves was fine and soft. Ben desperately hoped he’d scrubbed all the gunk off his own hands. “General Hux,” the man introduced himself, “and Millicent.” Millicent trilled and wound herself around Kylo Ren’s metal legs in greeting. “You look like you could prop a speeder up by yourself.” Hux added, voice dipping ever so slightly, deliciously, lower.

Ben flushed under the appraisal. “Yes, well, I need both hands to work.” Rey giggled beside him, and Ben resolved to get her back in some way if she dared to tease him over this.

Luke returned with the bags, and Hux slung his over his shoulder. Luke spoke next, voice cheerful and boisterous as ever. He raised it to be heard over a grav-metro arriving in the station from the opposite direction. “Have you considered my daughter’s offer?”

Hux opened his mouth to reply, and a bone-shaking BOOM reverberated through the station. The floor and walls and light fixtures rumbled with it, dust drifting down from the ceiling’s frame. Every sentient within the station halted, people silenced and droids whirring in confusion as their sensors lit up. The BOOM had come from no evident source, as if a crack had opened in space to allow through the sound of some great God banging his fist upon his desk. The BOOM had, in fact, been heard with equal magnitude throughout every part of the city-state, and though most would deny it later, a few swore later that at the time of the blast the sky had flickered black.

“Koschei,” said Ben, “They detonated one earlier too.” But his face betrayed his doubt. He’d felt the BOOM in the pit of his stomach and couldn’t shake the resulting queasiness. Kylo Ren placed a metal hand on his shoulder in comfort.

“That was no koschei,” Hux said quietly. “I’ve never heard a blast like that before. And I’ve heard many.” A veritable fleet of 2/chef de gares buzzed past with the alarm lights on their forms flashing, underscoring Hux’s remark. This was something unusual indeed.

The smell reached them first, a terrible burning thing, choking in its intensity. Cold washed over Ben and settled into his bones. Rey turned to confer with Luke, face a mask of worry. Hux walked briskly toward the end of the grav-metro, and Ben followed, keeping his body instinctively between Hux’s and the tracks as if to shield the military man from whatever horror was there. Voices murmured through the station as people crowded the working droids, “What? Burned! Crushed?”

It was a battered corpse, first fallen onto the magnet bed and then rolled over by the oncoming Grav. Rumors were already swirling through the crowd – that the man had been a fare-evader, or a terrorist, and the station droids had executed him by throwing him in front of the grav-metro instead of using a detonation. Unlikely, Ben thought. He averted his eyes from the charred, hooded corpse as the droids tossed it up from the tracks and onto the waiting lev-trolley. It would be disposed of with the trash, he guessed. He felt tears welling in his eyes and struggled to hold them back, his lips trembling.

He was shocked when he turned back to Hux and found a tear slipping down the older man’s cheek as well. Hux chuckled, caught in his emotion, and wiped his face with his gloves. “Awful,” he said. “Ha! I’ve looked death in the eye many times over. I don’t know why this one is any different. I can’t explain it.”

“No,” Ben said, adding, “This death touches me too.”

“Come,” said Hux, “We should go, and spare your cousin this. She’s approaching.” He raised his voice to address Rey, striding back to meet her before she could catch sight of the proceedings. “Miss Rey, it would be my pleasure to accompany your family today, if you will have me!”

Ben heard Rey shriek with delight and forced himself to follow Hux woodenly away from the tracks, trying to bury the dread pulsing along his spine.

  
  


Leia Organa was not liked by all who knew her, perhaps by less than half, but she was universally respected. She was respected for her quick wit, her energetic disposition, and her unquestionable honesty. In her presence -- the sharp look in her brown eyes -- there was something that produced the physical effect of admiration in the people she met. “Ah! Senator Organa and Threepio! Here you are!” was almost always said with a certain fondness upon encountering her, even by her political opponents.

The principal qualities in Leia which had gained her this universal respect consisted, primarily, of her extreme indulgence for her people, and secondly of her perfect egalitarianism. In her very blood was the virtue of treating all she encountered perfectly equally regardless of their fortune. Though she was easy to rile in defense of her causes, and if pushed, her biting remarks left deep wounds, she had never done anyone an injury that all of society at large would not admit was warranted.

Waiting for Leia outside her office as she left to meet her family was the welcome sight of Poe Dameron and his Class 3, BB8. The little orange ball droid beeped at her and rolled in a tight circle in greeting. Poe was young, younger than her son, and Leia felt very maternal toward him. As a result of this she had stuck her neck out for him more often than she ought, a fact that Poe had become used to and now expected of her in his reckless way.

“You didn’t see Ben in the lobby?”

“If I had, BB8 would’ve called Threepio instead of the both of us trekking up here,” Poe said jovially, making a show of wiping his brow with his hand as he fell into step with her.

“You took the lift,” Leia rolled her eyes at him as they re-entered it together, descending rapidly and smoothly in the transparisteel capsule to the Senate’s ornate lobby. The entire building was of white durasteel except the Minister’s office on the top floor, which featured an enormous stained glass window beneath the lifted and transplanted colorful towers which had once adorned the Kremlin, the old building defunct but not abandoned entirely in this more advanced society.

Leia’s family stood out in stark contrast against the pristine fixtures of the lobby and the similarly-white 2/secretaire droids. Luke and Rey wore their Jedi robes, Luke in dusty brown and Rey in her preferred dark gray. Exiting the lift, Leia walked briskly to embrace her twin.

“It’s so good to see you,” Luke said warmly. “You changed your hair.” Leia ignored the jab -- she knew more braids than bibliothecaire droids knew books.

“Where on Earth have you hidden my niece, and who is this strapping grown woman?” Leia asked, turning to Rey. Rey greeted her with a smile fit to recharge a whole crate of spent fuel cells, and a hug just as tight as Luke’s had been.

“Aunt Leia, it’s so good to see you again!”

“Are you excited for your birthday? I just finalized the plans this morning, and I do think you’ll love it,” Leia teased. “Our celebrations start today.”

“ _What?_ Already?” Rey practically vibrated with excitement.

Leia turned to Ben to relay her directions to him, and the words died on her lips. There was a man standing next to her son who she’d previously only seen in holophotos. She’d recognize his unique coloring and hideous smirk anywhere.

“Oh, Leia,” Luke said. “This is Hux. He sat across from us on the Grav. Rey invited him along with us since our destination was the same. Have you met?”

“Not quite,” Hux said, extending a gloved hand to her. “Although I certainly know of you, Tsarevna.” He rolled the R gratingly and Leia bristled at the name. Snoke represented the interests of the First Order in the Senate, and his people were prone to calling her by her abandoned title. Andrew Snoke was perhaps the only man in Moscow whom Leia was incapable of tolerating, and the feeling was mutual on his part.

She recovered and shook his hand, pulling back as quickly as was acceptable. “General Hux. Senator Snoke speaks frequently of your accomplishments. You have returned to planetary duty?”

“I’ve taken leave for my father’s passing.” Hux corrected her gently, punctuating the statement with a slight smile to counteract any awkwardness.

“Ah,” Leia said. She remembered now hearing that the commandant had died and thinking the world better for it. “I’m sorry for your loss. Brendol Hux was a... _significant_ man.”

Hux laughed drily. “You’re correct, although you may save your condolences.”

Leia looked at him sharply at that, assessing him and finding him unreadable beneath the surface. She turned back to Ben, appraising his stained jumpsuit disapprovingly, and said, “We’re taking your cousin to the skate-maze over the Moska.”

Rey exclaimed with delight at the news; she loved to skate.

Hux shifted and said to Ben, “It was lovely to make your acquaintance, Ben Solo.” Leia did not like the way Hux eyed her son, and liked the flustered look Ben returned him even less. Then, to Rey and Luke, Hux also bade his goodbyes. “I must go now to finalize my father’s death report. Thank you for your kind company.”

“Wait!” said Rey, “Meet us at the skate-maze! Won’t you?”

“Rey, leave the man be,” Luke chided her, smiling.

Hux looked at them both with something approaching good humor, and then glanced back at Ben.

“It is bad form to disappoint the birthday girl,” Ben told him laughingly. “And if you upset my sweet cousin I’ll be forced to hate you. Unless of course you can’t skate.”

Hux grinned at him, “Well then I’m left no choice. I _can_ skate, and can’t bear the thought of you hating me.” Rey whooped with victory, hugging Hux, and Leia bit back any disagreements out of love for her. The momentary amusement she felt in seeing the young General disgruntled with Rey’s ubiquitous affection was not worth the price of seeing him again.

“You’re welcome,” Rey told Ben after Hux had taken his leave, Ben reddening and playfully jostling her on their way out the door. No, nothing was worth having to see that wretched man again, Leia thought.

  
  


In his student days, Poe Dameron had been in love with Ben Solo, up until the day that Ben finally and firmly refused his advances and they had settled into comfortable friendship. That very year was the first that Poe laid eyes on Ben’s cousin, and then he commenced being in love with her. He had felt for some time that he simply must be in love with one of Leia’s relations, so enamored was he with the family, but things had never progressed with Ben and indeed they were better suited to comraderie. However, upon meeting Rey, Poe realized which of Leia’s relations he was indeed destined to love.

It seemed to Poe that Rey was so perfect in every respect that she was above the terrestrial, and by contrast he was himself so earthly that he was doomed to be spurned by her as Ben had spurned him. In every move she made there was a lightness, like a bird in flight, and she shone with endless mirth and love. It was as if she was not simply a vessel for love but a generator of it, spilling over and filling everyone she encountered as well. Her moods hung the stars at night and the clouds in the day, so vivacious was she. That she was exceedingly pretty was only another remarkable thing about her.

Poe’s hopes had almost been dashed when Rey met him the next summer with an ex-trooper by her side, the man dark and handsome, and had introduced him as Finn, her boyfriend. But over the course of that season enough flirting had occurred between all three of them that Poe’s determination was renewed, his affections now shared between both people.

It was a bright and frosty day at the skate-maze, speeders lined up on the streets around it, and citizens frolicking across the layer of transparisteel that stretched in the air over the Moskva river, held aloft and magnetized by whirring machines beneath it. The air was filled by the electric purr of skates held above the glass.

Rey was as easy to pick out of the crowd as a rose among nettles. She made everything bright around her, her smile seeming to beautify all who answered it, her form graceful as she twirled electromagnetically through the air on her skates.

On any given day in Moscow, revelers came to the winding skate tracks to glide along with friends or to practice their skill on their razor-thin magnetized skate blades, gliding along without resistance as the positive charge of the maze gently repelled the positive charge of the skates. A 2/maitre de patinage occasionally alternated whether the patrons’ skates went forward or backward, to much laughter and delight.

Poe, who had been gliding along by Ben’s side, overcome with worry over his plan to make Rey an offer, finally mustered up the courage and he bid Ben farewell, skating ahead to Rey. Ben watched them, and may have skated up and joined them just to aggravate Poe, had he not just then felt a tap at his elbow.

“You made it!” Ben said, smiling wide, forgetting in his happiness his dislike of his own crooked teeth. Hux had abandoned his greatcoat for this activity, and the sight of his hot-whip and blaster hanging on his slim hips unobscured made Ben’s skin warm.

Hux offered Ben his arm and Ben took it gleefully, hooking their elbows together and clasping Hux’s hand in his, jolting when he realized that Hux had shed his gloves in addition to his coat and that their hands were joined together skin on skin. Ben ran his thumb over Hux’s instinctively and then looked up to the man’s face. His eyes, his mouth. Hux grinned back at him, and Ben felt for the first time in his adult life that he was looking at someone not only exceptional enough to catch his attention, but someone who returned that attention with the same intensity, and he was smitten.

They skated forward in step, Kylo Ren a step behind them obligingly carrying Millicent. The little droid had chirped and hopped up at her first opportunity. Ben asked, “Have you got a first name then, or do you sign it away when you join the First Order?”

“Armitage,” Hux said, “Though I am not in the habit of responding to it. Is Ben short for something?”

“Uh, sort of. My parents named me after my Uncle’s old Master, and his name was Obi Wan, so Ben was short for him. It’s not for me, it’s my full name.”

A young boy skating down a track some distance away from them pitched head over heels, tumbling abruptly off the track and landing hard on the frozen ground. This kind of accident was unheard of even for beginning skaters, given the self-correcting mechanisms built into the skates. Neither Ben nor Hux noticed this event, however, so absorbed were they in each other.

“Do you mean to stay in Moscow long?”

“No, unfortunately,” said Hux, feeling for the first time that it was unfortunate. “My father is to be buried at the Academy in the south.” He had planned to cut his leave short and return to duty after the burial was complete, but looking at Ben now lit by the sun, all dark hair and pale skin and brown-gold eyes, Hux’s mind was occupied by the possibility of seeing him again.

“Can I take you to dinner, while you’re here?” Ben’s eyes were rapt as he asked, his lips soft, his big ears flushed -- Hux abruptly wanted to pull him in by them and kiss him. Before Hux could respond, a stout middle-aged man directly in front of them flew down the track and onto the hard ground, just as the boy had, and landed with an audible thump.

“Unusual,” Hux said.

“Where’s Rey?” Ben asked, voice tense as he scanned the crowd.

They both looked around in silence and then Hux sighted her, “There, the corner.”

Rey was with Poe, as she had been, talking as they whirled down track after track, and Finn had joined them by now. Poe was melting back into the comfort he normally shared with them, nerves assuaged. He grabbed each of their hands and they spun in a triangle for a moment before he said, “Actually, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you, Rey.”

At that moment, Rey’s body was jerked out of Poe and Finn’s grasp, hurtling away from them like a ragdoll flung violently aside. In an instant, she was a dozen yards away, flying towards another skater who was mysteriously shooting forward at the same velocity that Rey was shooting backward.

“BB!” Poe shouted, “They’ll collide!” And the Class 3 launched himself into action, rolling down the track after Rey. No matter how fast the machine was, though, it looked that the skaters were being propelled faster.

“Rey!” Ben cried, skating forward as well, helplessly pursuing his cousin. He dragged Hux with him at first and then Hux pulled him up short, stopping them with a strength that Ben would not have guessed he could have.

“We’ll never reach her!” Hux said, and then unsheathed the hot-whip from his thigh and cracked it down through the transparisteel beneath their feet, into one of the machines whirring away below it. It sparked and died, and the portion of track affecting Rey was demagnetized. She wrenched herself off it, falling to the side just before the other skater would have careened into her.

All over the skate-maze scenes of havoc unfolded. The electromagnetic whims of the skates had taken control, propelling some skaters forward and some backward, and gyrating others in place until they were sick. An old matron on the track reserved for slower skaters rocketed forward at a dizzying speed until she was hurled off the course and down a snow-crusted embankment. Two men collided hard enough that one bloodied his nose on the back of the other’s head. A young woman was flung into a tree and cried as she gripped one of her arms, bent at a sickening angle.

“Get your skates off!” Hux urged, ripping the 1/patins from his feet. Ben followed suit and then called to Poe and Finn. They shed theirs and ran to Rey, sock feet slipping on the angled transparisteel, and freed her from hers as well. Ben surveyed the crowd for his mother, and, sighting her and Luke safely off the track by the coffee stand outside it, he ran about the perimeter of the skate-maze, saving those he could from colliding or flying off it at high speeds, swinging them down off the track as gently as he could. Hux ran in the opposite direction, doing his part to help by disabling the magnetic droids in patches along the maze, allowing skaters to jump to freedom.

“Separatists,” said Hux gravely when they reconvened at the entrance of the Park, their entire party shaken but unhurt.

“Who else?” Ben agreed darkly. Only the Separatists had the anarchic spirit to launch technological attacks on citizens of the Republic, as vengeance for the Empire’s lost war. Today, mercifully, the chaos was short-lived. Already, troops of 77s converged on the skate-maze, klaxons ringing. The wounded wailed, and here and there broken bodies lay in the snow, never to rise again of their own volition. The unhurt were terrified, exactly as the Separatists would want them to be. Ben turned back to Hux. “You skate well,” he said, “And we’re fortunate you came. My cousin would have been injured had you not disabled the track. We’re grateful.”

“It was you?” Rey asked, wrapped in the coat that Finn and Poe tended to pass between each other. “Thank you!”

“It seems we are fortunate indeed, as Ben says, to have met you today.” Luke agreed. Leia was silent behind him, face drawn. She had long suspected privately that the First Order were behind the attacks of the Separatists, although she did not yet have proof.

Rey approached Hux and grabbed his hands, her face open with sincere friendliness, and she told him, “We are all staying together this week for my birthday, my family and my dear friends, and I would be honored to have you among us, if you are able to be.” She turned to Poe and Finn, addressing them, “You are both staying the week, yes?”

“Yes!” Finn beamed at her, although he shot a cautious look at Hux’s First Order blaster.

“I don’t know, it depends on you,” said Poe, and blanched in horror as soon as he said it. BB8 burbled in annoyance beside him.

“Well then you are,” Rey told him, laughing. “Starting with dinner. Let’s leave this place.”

  
  


“They should be rounded up,” Leia said sternly, plucking another oyster from the pile at the center of their table. “Every last one of them should be rounded up and tried for their crimes against the people of Moscow.”

“Tried? They should be shot like the beasts they are,” Finn countered, plainly still incensed by Rey’s near-collision. These two stances were the gist of the evening news feed as well, as the attack on the skate-maze was covered on every holo-screen in the city.

Luke offered a more tempered response, though it had been his daughter among them who was threatened, “Has there not been enough bloodshed? An offer of amnesty, to address their grievances peacefully, might be the wiser path.”

“For the moderates if there are any, certainly,” Ben said, “But for the ones releasing koschei into the streets and tampering with our machines, planting emotion bombs? Let them be hung in the streets. Let them rot there, I say.”

The conversation continued on that way for a few more minutes, but then trailed away and reconfigured itself upon happier subjects. Luke raised his champagne flute in a toast to his daughter, and they all shouted merrily over it as they clinked their glasses together.

“Got any ideas for your Class 3 yet?” Finn asked Rey. He didn’t have one himself; stormtroopers did not receive them, and since leaving the Order he had spent his funds in other ways.

“I want an animal,” Rey said decisively. “Everyone contribute one and we’ll vote on it!”

“It’s your droid, you should decide alone,” Luke told her warmly, but then he winked and held an oyster up, “Mollusk.”

Rey groaned at him, “Oysters can’t walk, what would I do with an oyster droid?”

“Put legs on it,” Poe supplied.

“Chicken legs,” Finn added.

“You are all determined to be unhelpful,” Rey sniffed at them, pulling the cheese plate toward her. And then realizing there were no olives, leaping up and demanding that Ben help her procure some. Finn and Poe got up as well, seeking another bottle of champagne for the table.

Hux was left with Luke and Leia, and pointedly drew his comms unit from his pocket to check it, giving the pair at least the pretense of privacy.

“Do you think she’ll accept an offer?” Leia asked her brother.

“I don’t know, honestly,” Luke answered. “She’s fond of him. But there’s Finn. You know for a fact he intends to make one? To both of them?”

“I do. In fact he divulged to me that Finn has already accepted his offer on the condition that Rey does. And why should she not? Everything is before them.”

“You sound bitter, Leia. Is it over for you already?”

“No, not over exactly, but the future is theirs.”

“I’ve been in love,” said Luke somewhat wistfully, “And not merely love, not just a feeling but a sort of force outside of my soul acting upon me. _A force, a force, a powerful force_ ,” He sang the last in a tune unfamiliar to Hux. “I want nothing else for her. If she finds that in Poe, then he’s got my blessing. But the choice is hers and I don’t pretend to know what my daughter keeps in her secret heart.”

“I’ll tell you what I think,” said Leia, “Or rather, Han… Han is a wonderful man, of course. As wonderful as he is awful.”

“All the best ones are.”

Leia sighed, mulling over her position with her husband, and then continued, “He sees right through people, as though he had a physiometer installed in him, and he says that Rey is certain to be married to Poe.”

The twins fell into silence as they contemplated that, the assertion of their missing friend. Teacups and glasses clinked in the restaurant, droids bustled in the kitchen, and 1/lumieres came on automatically just as the twilight demanded it.

“You there,” Luke said, turning to Hux with a wide smile. “Your estate is in the southern country? Do you host a Hunt-and-be-Hunted?”

Hux put his comms unit away, no longer pretending to read it. “The Academy used to hold one annually, but there are no cadets anymore.” He said amiably. “The faculties are still in place.”

The rest of their party returned with their proffered olives and champagne, and as a group they drank another round before clearing out of the restaurant and back to the Organa apartment. There they turned on the Galena box, settling in the drawing room where they joked boisterously with each other in turns. Poe and Finn got up and danced with each other, nearly making Rey roll with laughter, such were their theatrics.

“Rey,” Luke said at last, interrupting the meaningless and pleasant prattle. “Do you still remember where Leia keeps the coffee? Why don’t you go and make a pot.”

“Master Luke,” Threepio spoke up, but Luke shushed the droid with a wave of his hand.

“I’m afraid I prefer my coffee human-made. I’m difficult like that. I enjoy the fluctuation.”

“I can,” Ben offered, already rising from where he had seated himself next to Hux on the smaller of the couches.

“Rey will,” Luke said firmly, and Ben sat again immediately, still trained to obey his once-Master. “I won’t have the authority to boss my daughter around much longer. She’ll delegate her tasks to her Class 3. Let me enjoy it.”

“Unless it doesn’t have arms. Someone make a note, the oyster with legs needs arms to make coffee with.” Finn said.

Once Rey had hopped up and bounced out of the room, Luke sent a meaningful look to Poe, who shakily rose and trailed after her.

Hux chuckled and, when Ben looked at him questioningly, whispered in his ear, “Master Skywalker believes that Poe will make his daughter an offer.” Ben was so distracted by Hux’s breath warm against the shell of his ear that the content of his words took a minute to set in. After they did, his stomach jumped. The evening was about to get a lot better or a lot worse.

Rey turned when she felt someone enter the Organa kitchen behind her, and then seeing it was Poe, asked him to get a fresh 1/filtre-a-cafe out of the cabinet nearest him while she measured out the grounds.

When Poe brought the filter over, he cleared his throat and said, “Having found you alone,” his eyes caressed her face, “I told you that I did not know whether I would stay the week, that it depended on you…”

Rey caught his gaze, heart fluttering suddenly with understanding.

“That it depended on you,” Poe repeated. “I meant to say...I meant to say...I want for us -- Rey, to be my wife--!” He brought out, and then stopped short, mortified.

Rey smiled wide, and it was like laying in a patch of sunshine to behold her. She was feeling ecstasy. Her soul was flooded with happiness. She lifted her clear, truthful eyes, and seeing his desperate face answered hastily.

“Finn?”

“Yes!” Poe said, face deeply red. “Yes, I’ve already asked him, and he’s agreed!”

“Then my answer is yes!” Rey leapt into Poe’s arms and kissed his cheek sloppily.

When Rey and Poe emerged with a tray of coffee cups, their joy was so immediately apparent that Finn launched himself up with an excited _whoop_ and cried, “We’re getting _married!”_ The coffee was distributed by the joyful trio, faces fit to split from smiling, the entire assembled company laughing and smiling together.

Rey was secretly extremely gratified in having made a favorable impression on Hux; she could see in his interactions with her that he admired her in turn. She had fallen at once in love with him in the way that young people fall in love with older people sometimes who intrigue them, not romantically but nevertheless profoundly. She fell in love with the snap of his regimental movements and the serious and at times mournful look in his pale eyes, which attracted her in being utterly unknown to her. His wonderful Class 3 too, seemed even in her perfect silence to be marked by a soulful depth of emotions. The pair of them were inaccessible, complex, and to Rey’s eyes poetic. In addition, his coloration and Arduin high society accent reminded her sadly and sweetly of her deceased mother, Mara Jade Skywalker. These attributes alone would have thoroughly captivated Rey, but at the apparent opportunity to match Hux with her dear cousin, she was energized into action.

“Tomorrow night is my actual birthday, and there will be a float,” she told him.

“Your first?” He asked.

“Yes! I want mine to be one where _everyone_ enjoys themselves. Have you been to many?”

“Oh, in my day. Though for me there were no floats where I enjoyed myself,” said Hux, and here again was his mysterious world which was not open to her. “For me there were only some less dull and tiresome than the others.”

“How could _you_ be dull at a float?”

“Why should _I_ not be dull at a float?” Hux countered playfully.

“Because you look so nice! I bet nicer than all the other officers.”

Hux had the faculty of blushing. “In the first place that’s not so, and secondly if it were, what difference would it make to _me?_ ”

“Will you come to my float?” Rey asked earnestly. “I shall be so glad if you do, I would like to see you dancing. You can dance with Ben!”

Ben choked on the drink he was taking.

Hux laughed. “If I do go, I shall simply have to comfort myself with the thought that it’s a pleasure to you.”

“I imagine your droid at the ball glowing with an amber hue,” Rey said, raising her hand to Millicent for the little droid to sniff at.

“And why amber precisely?” Hux asked, smiling now with genuine amusement. Class 3s were often programmed to glow in fanciful colors at public events, to lend an extra je ne sais quois to their masters. “I know why you want me in attendance, Miss Rey.” Hux told her conspiratorially. “You expect to leave this float with your companion robot in tow, and you want everyone you know to be there and take part in it.”

“How did you know? Yes,” Rey said, hushed so that Luke would not hear her.

“Oh, what a happy age you’re at,” Hux mused. “I remember the feeling. As if gravity has been suspended, not just at the float but after. That mist that covers everything when childhood is just ending, and out of that receding time, there is a path growing narrower and narrower, and it is as delightful and alarming to leave the ballroom as it was to enter it, bright and splendid as it was, for greater excitement lies without...but I’m rambling. I will be quiet, now.”

Rey smiled at him without speaking, lost in imagining how it must have been for him, someone who knew the high society of Arduinna as she hadn’t, who had indeed walked the same ancient stone halls as her mother. _How I would like to know all his stories._

It did not escape Luke’s notice that Han had been absent from all the festivities thus far in addition to Leia’s cryptic words -- _No, not over exactly._ As soon as the night had wound down, Rey bidding Poe and Finn a sweet goodbye and retiring to her room, Ben taking Hux out back as the man had wished to smoke, Luke turned to his sister and meaningfully Ceased R2. Leia set down her coffee cup and also Ceased her Class 3.

“Leia…” he said, “I find myself at a loss to comfort you. I know that comfort may be impossible, but know that I love you both and I am very, very sorry for you.”

Under Leia’s thick lashes tears glittered. She moved closer to her brother and took his hand in hers. She said, “Comfort is impossible, yes. Everything is lost between Han and I, I feel. I told him I could not bear to live with him. I have stayed in my office. I don’t know where he is, perhaps only in the garage downstairs, but…”

“Tell me everything. Please.”

Leia relayed her sorrows to Luke, and he listened quietly. “And is he capable of remorse?” She finished, “No, I don’t believe so! And all of this has so terribly affected Ben.”

“Of course Han is remorseful,” Luke disagreed, “He’s good-hearted, only he’s so proud, and now humiliated. I see it so clearly,” (and here, Luke guessed at what would touch his sister’s heart most,) “He’s ashamed for dragging Ben into his affairs, and that, loving you, he has hurt you. Leia, I watched Han fall in love with you. I remember the times he came to me and cried, talking of you, and I know the longer he has lived with you the loftier you have been in his eyes. You know how often we’ve laughed at him together for putting in every other word, ‘Leia’s a remarkable woman.’ You’ve always been a divinity for him, every bit the Tsarevna you were when you met, and you are that still. Just as he is every bit the scoundrel, though this is what troubles you so.”

“He won’t give it up, his actions have been repeated again and again,” Leia mused angrily.

“And must be forgiven,” Luke urged her. “Anger leads to hate, and hatred to suffering. You must forgive him his trespasses as though they had never been, and move forward together.”

“Come,” said Leia, flicking Threepio back to life. “Let’s get you to your room.” As they stood, she embraced her twin. “How glad I am you came,” Leia said. “It has made things better.”

Before retiring to bed, Luke had R2 send a communique to Chewie reading simply _Come home tomorrow, the Force is merciful_.

Below Luke’s window, in the back garden, Hux smoked with Ben at his side, occasionally offering him a drag.

“You’ll be back?” Ben asked.

“Oh, as often as I am invited, I think,” Hux returned, green eyes bright in the low glow of his cigarette. “I must attend the float lest Rey not forgive me for my absence.” Their hands were clasped together again, and Hux gave Ben’s palm a light squeeze which Ben returned.

Han Solo did return to the apartment proper the next morning, and in the relations of husband and wife some estrangement remained, but there was no talk now of separating, and Luke Skywalker saw in them the possibility for reconciliation. Chewie, hulking as he always was inside the apartment, his massive bronze form bristling with hanging cords and end-effectors useful to a mecanicien, even endeavored to make a mournful sound at Threepio, who turned away but did not disparage him. The whole day Leia was a little mocking in her tone to her husband, which Han understood for forgiveness and which made him happy and cheerful, though he was careful not to seem so happy as to have forgotten his offense.

  
  


The float was beginning, and Rey and her father walked up the great staircase together, flooded with soft white light and lined with flowers. Bracing themselves against the banister, they bent at the leg and waited with anticipation at the top step until the special chime was sounded, signaling the first blasts of jet-powered air from the hidden matrix of pipes in the floor and walls. At the same moment, the notes of the waltz began, and father and daughter jumped together and caught the air, dancing in an airborne three quarters time about the room with their guests.

Rey flew into the float-room floor in her white tulle dress over its gray slip as though she had been born in that tulle and lace,bouncing gracefully above the floor, with her hair done up in three buns and daisies arranged in it and belted around her waist. She felt that she had never been so comfortable in her appearance as she was this day. Her dress fit her everywhere, none of her daisies were torn off by the jets, and her hair stayed up as she wanted. She wore a strip of gray velvet around her neck. That velvet was delicious; admiring herself in the looking glass at the Organas’, Rey had felt that the dark and stormy velvet tied her whole look together. She had requested that her Class 3 be lined with velvet, and she wanted to be dressed to match it when it arrived.

Rey smiled now, too, when she caught glimpses of herself in the mirror panels on the walls as she danced. Her bare shoulders and arms gave her the sense of a sculpted statue, a feeling she particularly liked. Her eyes sparkled, and her lips could not keep from smiling from the consciousness of her own attractiveness on this, her birthday, and the day after her acceptance of the marriage proposal of her greatest loves. Her fiances and the many society guests Leia had invited kept her dancing without pause, her dress billowing around her.

The vaulted room was rendered, as was much of the city, in durasteel, although this room was golden where many were silver or white. The rich color of the fixtures contrasted beautifully with the white flowers which decorated them and which swirled through the air with the dancers. Three regiments of 77s stood guard below, at the edges of the room, earthbound. Their heads swiveled endlessly, sensing the room, protecting the crowd.

Rey turned her attention to her fellow dancers as Finn took her hand again and the music slowed from triple time to four-four, the air slowing with it, transforming from the rapid puffs of a waltz to magisterial gusts. Down below, in the seating area, Rey caught sight of Ben, and beside him the exquisite form of Hux, with Millicent glowing not amber between her plates but purest black. He wore a black suit over a white shirt, and his hot-whip crackled wickedly orange where it curled around his upper thigh.

“Mr. Hux is here,” she told Finn. “Let’s go and say hello.”

Finn obligingly steered them that way, downward and diagonally, continually saying to the other dancers, “Pardon us, thank you, pardon us…”

At last they landed and Rey rushed to her cousin, kissing his cheek and then addressing Hux. “I’m very glad you came!”

However, one of Leia’s guests interrupted her in that moment, coming up to Hux boldly and tapping his shoulder.

“Korsunsky!” Hux said, and then seeing that Rey did not know him, “Miss Rey, this is Arkadyich Korsunsky, who works in the Senate alongside your Aunt. I’ve made his acquaintance before.”

“I confess myself one of Senator Organa’s more faithful supporters,” said Korsunsky, a tall and bearded man with a squat little ball droid Class 3 similar to Poe’s. He had likely also been a pilot for the Republic then, and by default on unfriendly terms with Hux. “A waltz? Perhaps we find common ground in this place, General?” Korsunsky asked, bending at the waist to offer Hux his hand.

“I don’t dance when it’s possible not to dance,” Hux said bluntly, not moving in the slightest to take the man’s hand.

“But tonight it’s impossible,” Rey said, having so wished for Hux to dance.

Hux smiled at her obligingly. “Well, since it’s impossible tonight,” he turned to Ben, dressed completely in black beside him, “Let us start.” And he hastily put his hand on Ben’s shoulder and led him to the dancefloor just as the next chime sounded and the pipes huffed anew, launching them into the air.

Korsunsky flushed slightly, and begged Rey’s hand instead, but they had only just ascended to the first tier when a high whistle blew, the music stopped and the air jets cut off, and everyone tumbled to the ground.

Rey cried out as she fell, but the floor of the ballroom was of course lined with plush mats and the greatest risk was not injury but embarrassment. As the erstwhile floaters, some laughing, some calling out in confusion, struggled to their feet, Rey found herself pulled upright by Korsunsky, who was among those taking the incident with good-natured merriment, assuming it was triggered accidentally.

Standing again, Rey saw that Hux had landed on top of her cousin and was smiling down at him broadly, one hand cupped alongside his face -- which had taken on an alarmingly red color -- before relenting and disentangling himself to help Ben up. Rey was delighted on Ben’s behalf at this development, until, in the next moment, she found herself surrounded by blinking 77s and the white-uniformed Peacekeeper who managed them. He brought with him Korsunsky’s fat little Class 3 which was twittering confusedly.

“Sir,” began the Peacekeeper, “Can you confirm the provenance of this machine?”

“Why indeed,” Korsunsky replied readily, pulling away from Rey and to the side of his beloved-companion. “This is my Class 3, BB4. Is there some sort of difficulty?” Rey watched Korsunsky’s eyes darting rapidly between the stern Peacekeeper to his little robot.

“Pardon me, sir, but I did not inquire as to the machine’s name. I asked if you can vouch for its origins.” The Peacekeeper’s tone was hardening, his eyes suspicious.

Rey turned to look at Hux again, who had not set Millicent to glow in amber as Rey had imagined, but instead to gently silhouette him in darkness like velvet. Before tonight Rey had been sure that some warm tone to brighten his fiery hair would render Hux angelic, but seeing him now silhouetted in black, Rey felt that she had misunderstood his charm. His hair was just as bright without a warm accent, and his skin seemed carved from white marble. She noticed with a start that he wore a daisy in his lapel, and her fondness for him intensified. Indeed his coiffure was not striking, it was refined but ordinary in style. He was striking in spite of it. She saw him now as someone whose charm was in standing out against his attire, someone whose companion light could never be noticeable on him. He looked so incredibly natural standing next to Ben, who had set Kylo Ren to glow similarly. They looked every bit a couple, and Rey resolved again to match them together if she could.

“The difficulty is this, sir,” the Peacekeeper continued. “This Class 3 device has been implanted with a transmitter by enemies of the state, and must be destroyed.”

An audible gasp of horror circulated the room, followed by a ripple of disapproval and sadistic excitement. Korsunsky ran his hands through his hair in confusion, “This cannot be! I am myself a Senator! I am no Separatist!”

“No one has suggested so, but this machine has been corrupted.”

“Wait! No -- _NO!_ ” cried Korsunsky, as the massive 77s surrounded his small round Class 3, which beeped frightfully. “ _BB4!_ ”

Hux appeared at Rey’s side and then walked past her, hands raised before him in a calming manner. The Peacekeeper, noting Hux’s authoritative military air, paused.

“Armitage Hux,” Korsunsky said imploringly, head rapidly moving between Hux’s face and the Peacekeeper’s. “You know me and my droid, we ran drills around each other for at least ten years! This is my beloved-companion which flew with me when I escorted your shuttle out of quadrant M-12. _Please._ ”

BB4 beeped plaintively.

“Don’t correct me,” Korsunsky told it, “Not now of all times! It was M-6, he says.”

“It was M-6,” Hux affirmed. “If it has been corrupted by Separatists, it must be destroyed, its history be damned.” Korsunsky choked out a sob even as he nodded mutely. Hux continued sympathetically, “And yet it would be a great cruelty to deprive you of a beloved-companion without reason.”

“Respectfully, sir,” the Peacekeeper chimed in, glancing with agitation at the red and emotional face of Korsunsky, “There is no way to check the thing, such devices are often rigged with trigger bombs as well.”

Hux, clearly put off with the Peacekeeper for presuming to know more than himself, stood for a moment in thought, his thumb idly tracing a circle around the hilt of his hot-whip. Rey saw, with a spark of excitement and joy that mingled sickenly with her terror and pain on Korsunsky’s behalf, that Hux cast a quick, distracted glance back at Ben, to be sure, despite the gravity of the situation, that he had _his_ attention.

At last Hux gave a small sigh that meant plainly _I must do every damned thing myself_ and motioned aside two of the 77s with a wave of his hand, bending down in front of BB4. Not waiting for permission from the Peacekeeper, he carefully and with evident expertise, removed an exterior panel from BB4 and cracked open the servomechanism.

A long, tense moment then passed while Hux observed the machine’s inner workings and Korsunsky sniffed and wrung his hands, and whined helplessly from where he stood rooted to his spot in fear for his Class 3.

“Yes,” Hux said finally, straightening up and roughly wiping some grease off his hands onto his sharply pressed trousers. “There is old Empire tech here. This is a Separatist machine. I’m sorry.”

“No…” Korsunsky shook violently, tears streaming down his face. The Peacekeeper, wasting no more time, motioned to the 77s. Cords snaked out of their torsos, searching for the right points on the droid.

Hux hissed in distaste -- putting the droid down by electric shock would be a lengthy and loud affair. “Stop,” he said sharply. “Stop that, allow me.” The 77s stood down.

“Hux! _Hux please!_ ” said Korsunsky.

Hux drew his hot-whip and cracked it once, splitting the droid’s head nearly all the way down the middle. BB4 was gone in a fraction of a second.

“Ah, God…” cried the droid’s master, kneeling beside the dark and silent shell of his companion robot, which never again would give him comfort or consolation through life’s trials. “Merciful God…”

The crowd, while sympathetic to Korsunsky’s unimaginable loss, was also relieved at the elimination of the threat. Korsunsky, sobbing harshly, shakily took his junked droid out of the hall and took all misery with him, it seemed. The float could proceed.

Hux sheathed his hot-whip again and turned to Rey. “I apologize deeply for the unpleasantness of that on your eighteenth birthday,” he said.

“In time Korsunsky may see the gift you gave him in the merciful execution of his droid,” Ben spoke up from her side. His low voice was made richer with emotion. The music began again, and this time Ben offered Hux his hand.

Poe appeared at Rey’s other side, taking her waist without a word, and the dance commenced again. The dancers waltzed several times through the air, and Rey noted that Ben and Hux did not change partners even when one of them was propositioned. Rey knew the signs of romance from her own relationships with Finn and Poe, and now she saw them in Ben and Hux -- saw the quivering, flashing light in their eyes, and the unconscious smiles on their lips, and the deliberate precision of their movements, the way their hands came together or clasped at the other’s shoulder or waist as though memorizing the feel of it.

 _They are intoxicated by their admiration of each other_ , she thought, _they feel themselves alone in this crowded room, and it makes them all the more fascinating to the rest of us. Aunt Leia can’t tear her eyes away, either._ Rey found she admired Hux and her dear cousin Ben more than ever as a pair, and she felt that her heart might be glowing from her chest as if she herself were a Class 3, so happy she was for Ben’s happiness.

The float concluded with the presentation of Rey’s Class 3. It was a short, adorable seabird with a mouth like a feline’s, lined with charcoal velvet to make it soft just as Rey had wanted. Rey named him Porg, and they were applauded by the crowd. Rey felt that this was perhaps her best day, the unpleasantness of Korsunsky’s misery completely forgotten.

  
  


“There is something in me, hateful and repulsive,” Ben said to Kylo Ren, who nodded reluctantly. Together they were on their way to the lodgings of Kuruk Ren, who had been Ben’s friend in his childhood and his brief tenure in flight school, and who had inspired his beloved-companion’s name. “I don’t get on with other people. Pride, they probably think. No, I have no pride. If I had any pride I would not fool myself with this.” And he pictured Hux, clever and self-possessed with his handsome cat Class 3 bounding along at his feet, and felt sure that a man like that had never agonized over the mannerisms of others the way that Ben now agonized over him.

“Think it over again and you will see, Master,” supplied Kylo Ren in its deep voice.

“Am I foolish to think he might join his life to mine?”

“Who are you?”

“A nobody, not wanted by anyone, nor of use to anybody.”

Man and machine sighed heavily in melancholy unison. To prepare Ben for what was to be a difficult visit with the ailing Kuruk Ren, Kylo initiated his hologram function and displayed for his master a sequence of Kuruk Memories: Kuruk tottering drunkenly, sneering, cursing the world and everything in it, Kuruk piloting his _Night Buzzard_ alongside Ben’s _Grimtaash_ , Kuruk lightheartedly disparaging Ben’s calligraphy.

“He’s right that everything in the world is horrid, isn’t he?” said Ben.

“No,” said Kylo Ren, who felt sometimes that he must responsibly balance his master’s gloomy state with a more sober analysis. “No, it is unlikely.”

“And are we fair in our judgment of him? From the point of some he is despicable, tipsy and wearing that torn cloak. But I know him differently. I know his soul, and I know that we are like him. Of course, within reason,” Ben sighed.

Kuruk Ren had, when younger, lived like a monk, strictly observing all religious rites, services, and fasts, and avoiding every sort of pleasure, especially sex. But when Ben left Moscow for his ill-fated attempt at the life of a Jedi, Kuruk had broken out: he had associated with the most horrible people, and rushed into the most senseless debauchery -- including, it had been whispered, relationships of an intimate nature with robots. Such relationships were forbidden even in the most liberal construction of the Republic’s laws. It was horribly disgusting, yet to Ben it was not as disgusting as it would inevitably be to those who did not know Kuruk, did not know his story or his heart. Kuruk’s sins were softened by Ben’s love for him, which was that of a brother.

Ben felt that, in spite of the ugliness of Kuruk’s life, the man was in his soul no uglier than the people that despised him. Kuruk was not to blame for having seemingly been born with an unbridled temperament and limited intelligence. And now he had fallen terribly ill, though the precise nature of his illness remained unclear.

 _I will tell him everything, without reserve, and he will speak plainly as he does, and will enlighten me,_ Ben thought as he reached the hotel where Kuruk stayed.

He found the door to room 12 half open, and fumes of cheap tobacco were coming out, and there was the voice of a man unknown to Ben. But he knew at once Kuruk was there; he heard his rattling cough.

“Whom do you want?” Kuruk called angrily as Ben pushed the door open.

“It’s I,” Ben answered, coming forward into the room.

“Who’s I? You fucking dumbass,” said Kuruk fondly, stumbling into view, his stooping figure so familiar yet astonishingly foreign in his continued sickness. Karnak hunched in the corner, Kuruk’s battered and dented old android with black-orange streaks of rust staining it.

Kuruk was thinner each time Ben saw him, and this time his blond hair had grown thinner too, falling away in clumps. What was left on his head hung long and stringy. He kept an approximation of his mustache, but it too was thinning. He was sallow, skin pale and bloodless like some awful subterranean creature. Like a white worm slithering through the earth. The bones in his hands seemed huger than ever, and his face was sunken, his eyes deep-set and red, making his once-blue irises the color of dishwater. His visage held the expression of suffering even in his evident joy at seeing Ben, which was short-lived. This was the most tiresome part of maintaining a relationship with Kuruk; his temper flared at a rate which put even Ben to shame.

“Come to see me, then.” Kuruk spat. “Don’t want anything? Just come to see. That’s it?”

Ben refrained from pointing out that Kuruk didn’t have anything to offer him but companionship. He noticed a small, gray pustule just above Kuruk’s left brow, and as he looked at it, it pulsed.

“Thaaaaat’s iitttt?” croaked Karnak. Kylo Ren took a step away from the other machine as if afraid it’s degeneracy could be infectious.

“Well come in, sit down,” said Kuruk. “Ushar, light cigars for three. No, wait. Do you know who this is?” he said, addressing Ben.

“This man,” he said, pointing to the dark and skinny man on the couch, “is the partner of my life, Ushar. I took him out of a bad house.” Ben knew what Kuruk meant by that, and blushed because of it. “He’s mine and anyone who wants to know me,” said Kuruk, raising his voice, “respects him. He’s just the same as my husband, just the same. So now you know, and if you think you’re lowering yourself, well, here’s the floor, there’s the door.”

“Why I should be lowering myself, I don’t understand,” Ben said quickly, soothingly. As they smoked, Kuruk coughed and spat big globs of mucus onto the floor, and Ben noticed a second gray pustule on Kuruk’s cheek, and an angry patch of red peeking out the collar of his wrinkled and stained shirt.

Kuruk rambled on between coughs about a new idea he had, some sort of membership association for Class 3s.

“Why such an association?” asked Ben.

“Because robots have been made slaves, just as peasants were in another age! We treat them like objects because we created them, but they possess consciousness, free will--”

“Free will as constrained by the Iron Laws,” Ben reminded him.

“Yes, yes, the Iron Laws, but free will nevertheless,” said Kuruk, exasperated. “Are we any different? We live by a great many more laws.”

“We can break them, if we choose,” Ben disagreed.

“Can we?” Kuruk rasped. “Can we? We owe them, these magnificent automations, to try and get them out of their slavery.” He gestured to Karnak, who at that moment lost one of his arms to the pull of gravity with a muted clank.

Ben sighed, looking about the cheerless and dirty room. It became increasingly hard for Kuruk to talk as he was consumed by a series of shuddering coughs. Finally he stepped out onto his balcony to vomit mightily over the side. He announced wickedly from the balcony that evacuating himself onto the sidewalk below, occasionally onto a passing pedestrian, was the one small pleasure life still afforded him.

“Have you been long with my brother?” Ben asked Ushar.

“Yes, more than a year.” The man lowered his voice, turning away from Karnak, although it seemed to Ben that the machine was incapable of sensing anything. “Kuruk’s health has become very poor. Kuruk drinks a great deal.” He said.

“That is...how does he drink?”

“Drinks vodka, and it’s bad for him.”

“And a great deal of it?”

“Yes,” Ushar said, looking timidly toward the doorway where Kuruk Ren had reappeared, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. He resumed his tired oration, ending it with a bizarre warning that “If we do not allow robots to control their own destiny, they will control ours.”

Dismayed by his friend’s rapid deterioration, Ben forgot to mention his own troubles at all. Ushar promised to call for him if there was need, and Ben departed. As he and Kylo Ren descended the stairs, Ben decided that there was something wrong with Kuruk Ren far beyond the effects of too much drink, and wondered what exactly it could be.

  
  


Two days after the float, Hux had sent a communique via Millicent to Kylo Ren, telling Ben that he was leaving Moscow that day. He now rested with his beloved-companion in a lounge car of the Moscow-Groznyy grav-metro.

“Tomorrow I shall bury my father at Arkanis and my life will go on in the old way,” he told Millie. Millie sneezed at him in distaste, no patience in her little metal body for his decorus pretense. Hux felt, as he often did, that he and Millicent enjoyed a bond that was somehow deeper than other humans and their robots -- even though Millicent lacked the capability to breathe a single word, unusual for a Class 3, Hux knew in his heart that there was no one else on Earth, man or machine, who understood him so well. For the first time the thought brought him sadness, which of course Millicent was acutely aware of. She looked up at him with her little golden cats-eyes whirring and clicking.

“It’s pathetic, to be pining after some Republic mecanicien like this. I ought to be ashamed,” he told her, and she closed her eyes, ignoring him.

At the next stop, an elderly woman entered the same carriage and sat across from Hux, and so he placed two 1/orateur-discs delicately into his ears and endeavored to listen to a novel rather than be swept up into conversation. Try as he might, he could not immerse himself in the stories, and switched them several times. It was suddenly distasteful to follow the reflection of false lives lived by false people. He had too great a desire to live himself. If he heard that the hero of the story had fallen ill, he longed to move with noiseless steps about a darkened sickroom. If there was a pirate ship laying siege to a star destroyer, he longed to be the one on defense. But there was no chance of doing anything as the metro flew forward beneath the earth, beneath the snowstorms that raged across Russia today -- the 2/Grav-maitre had mentioned them.

Hux forced himself to relax and let the next available story wash over him. It was a period piece set thousands of years ago, and the heroine of the story was almost reaching her happiness, a handsome husband and a lakeside estate, and Hux was feeling a desire to walk also into the described estate with Ben at his side, when he sat up suddenly with the acute feeling again that he ought to be ashamed. _What have I to be ashamed of? Feelings? The presence of feelings?_ He thought. He felt injured in some intangible way, and switched off the audio, pulling the discs from his ears and stowing them again in a pocket. He resisted the urge to wake Millicent, who had switched herself into Cease.

Was there anything in his Moscow recollections to be ashamed of? They were good, pleasant. More than pleasant. If it were possible to engineer a man built exactly to Hux’s tastes he might suspect Tsarevna Leia of having done it, perhaps to undermine the Order. But such a thing was impossible, and was there any shame in enjoying the company of a beautiful man? Certainly not. Hux remembered the ball, remembered Ben in his suit, every piece of it black, matching his hair and contrasting vividly with his skin. Remembered the grip of his big hands, the look of adoration that softened his face, and how acutely Hux had wanted to lean in and kiss his plush lips, and here the feeling of shame intensified as though some inner voice said, _Warm, very warm, hot._

“Well, what of it?” he said aloud to himself. “I had no previous interest in a romantic engagement and now I do. I am my own man! I can do as I please.” He laughed contemptuously at himself and petted Millicent’s fur-plates unthinkingly. He felt as though something within him were being strained tighter, to the point of breaking. His fingers twitched. All shapes and sounds seemed in the uncertain half-light of the metro to strike him with a new vividness.

In this disjointed sense of hyperawareness, it took him a long moment to register what it was he was seeing across from him. A koschei: bronzish, thin and centipede-like, crawling on dozens of tiny sharp legs across the wrinkled neck of the dozing elderly lady seated in front of him. The steps of the hideous-bug robot were not heavy enough to wake the sleeping woman, and Hux thanked whatever God might be watching at least for that small mercy. If the woman woke and noticed the koschei, the very sight of the hideous bug-like death machine would cause her to panic and doom them both. Hux, holding his breath in trepidation, leaned forward in his seat, raising one hand, his forefinger and thumb ready to pluck the beast away...slowly, carefully he moved, never taking his eyes off the automaton crawling in and out of the wrinkled folds of the woman’s neck.

He was about to grasp the glowing, creeping thing, not yet considering what he would do with it once it was in his grasp, when three things happened in rapid succession.

One: a jellyfish-like blob of undulating silver flew over his ducked head from behind him and landed with a thick, disgusting splat across the old woman’s face, causing her to wake and thrash in her seat, her screams dampened by the silver crawling down her throat.

Two: Hux also screamed, loud enough to wake the dead, which was coincidentally enough to wake Millicent from voluntary Cease.

Three: the koschei he had been grasping for leapt off the old woman and onto his hand, and escaped up the sleeve of his uniform.

The sensation of the koschei twitching rapidly up his arm inside his clothing was viscerally horrifying, the sickening feeling of its tiny feet on his flesh made worse by his knowledge of what was surely its intention: to find his breastbone, pierce his flesh, and plunge its horrid bio-weapon harboring needle into the chambers of his heart. Hux clawed his uniform open across his chest, desperately feeling along the seam at the shoulder to intercept the wriggling beast.

There was nothing to be done for the elderly woman, even if he could: the jellyfish koschei was still clenched over her face and oozing out in all directions, covering her body, siphoning her living heat out. Hux could feel it from where he sat, like standing in front of a 1/refrigerateur. All over the Grav other koschei were attacking the passengers. A slavering machine in the shape of a giant cockroach, with coal-black wings and needle-teeth, buzzed down the aisle and landed on a Moscow gentleman, sinking it’s jaws into a dozen places in the unfortunate man’s face.

At last Hux grasped the horrid thing in his sleeve and pulled it forth, Millicent grabbing it deftly and crushing it between her jaws. The grav-metro came to a stop, not the quick halt of an emergency brake but the smooth glide into a station, and Hux scooped up his Class 3 and hustled them both to the end of the carriage, where they escaped into the rural station.

Hux had run up the steps before his heart calmed, and the driving snow and wind hit him like a blow, seeming to try and snatch him up and bear him off. He stood in the white expanse until he regained his wits, hardly feeling the cold air. With the giddy, life-embracing thrill of having survived, he drew in deep breaths, and took in the scant features of this isolated place as though they were great masterpieces hung in a museum. Every rolling snow-covered hill and faint dark shed or fence post seemed devastatingly lovely to Hux in this moment. Then, once he was calmed, he buttoned up the still-open breast of his uniform and retreated back down into the shelter of the station.

The station 77s, old models infrequently used, charged in to the coach, heads swiveling rapidly, spitting pincer-tipped cables from their midsections to capture and electrocute the koschei, sending a rapid laser-fire around the carriage from their arms to destroy the hostile machines. The battle was quickly over and the koscheis’ jaws wrenched off of passengers. Those who had escaped unscathed were crowding now out of the carriages and standing with Hux in the frozen station. There were many who hadn’t, who had been frozen solid and cracked apart in their seats like brittle toffee, or who had been injected with poisons and now convulsed, bloody foam flying from their lips as they died.

Two tall black-clad figures moved like twins through the car ahead of the one Hux had ridden in, coming to the door, and before they emerged Hux knew that it was _him_. Ben’s face, when it appeared in the door and he walked forward into the station, hit Hux as solidly as the storm outside had, threatening to bear him off somewhere else.

Ben approached him directly and asked in an urgent tone whether he’d been hurt. Hux gazed up their scant height difference for a long while without answering, and fancied he saw there that same expression of reverence which Ben’s face had held at the ball. He could feel the same expression on his own face now. He knew without asking that Ben was here to be with him, but asked anyway for the pleasure of hearing it.

“And what are you coming south for?” Hux breathed, unable to repress the delight and eagerness that shone in his eyes.

“What am I coming for?” Ben repeated gruffly. “You know that I have come to be where you are. I can’t help it.”

At that moment, the wind, surmounting all obstacles, sent snow flying down the steps into the station, and tore one of the transparisteel panels from the roof, sending it away to a chorus of stranded passenger’s screams. The awfulness of the storm and the terror of the koschei seemed to Hux almost splendid now, even as the source of that strange shame protested weakly within him, strained to the point of snapping. Hux’s face showed his conflict. Ben had said what his soul longed to hear, yet it frightened him.

“Forgive me,” Ben said humbly.

The mechanisms of the Grav flared to life again, the carriages having been cleaned and searched by the 77s.

Ben started again, sensing their time running out. “Not one word, not one gesture of yours shall I, could I ever forget…”

“Enough,” said Hux. “Enough. It is the same for me. Ben, I feel the same.” They looked greedily into each other’s faces, and as one resettled themselves in the same car of the Grav. They sat, indecorously, on the same side of their booth with Kylo Ren and Millicent opposite them. The grav-metro rolled forward once more, on its path to Groznyy.

Hux found that with Ben seated beside him, fearfully close, the heat of their bodies mingling through their sleeves where their arms touched, he was panic-stricken. The overstrained condition which tormented him before at the mere thought of Ben intensified now, and when Ben tremblingly took Hux’s hand in his, that unquantifiable something gave. Hux gasped aloud at the feeling, as though everything in him that tied him to the path of his life was ripped out to the root.

“I’m sorry,” Ben said at once, moving to take his hand away. Hux gripped it solidly. In the absence of the shame and panic that had filled him before there was something new, blissful and glowing. Exhilarating. A powerful force.

“Don’t be,” Hux said softly. “Don’t you ever be.”

  
  


The Grav travelled overnight, and Hux and Ben drifted together in a fitful sleep side by side. In Groznyy, when the Grav stopped and they got out, the first person to catch Hux’s attention was Senator Snoke.

“Don’t comment on his face,” Hux murmured to Ben, the two of them still walking hand in hand, Kylo Ren carrying Millicent beside them.

Covering the left side of Andrew Snoke’s face as always, hiding it, was a mask of silver, descending from brow to chin with only enough cut away to allow his nose and mouth their full functioning. While Snoke’s right eyebrow could -- and often did -- twitch sardonically, and while his right cheek could rise in wry and cruel humor, the corresponding parts on the left side of his face were hidden behind an unreadable sheet of metal, pitted in places unpleasantly. Where his left eye once sat was an aperture, a scientist’s reinvention of the human eye-socket, from which emerged a telescoping red oculus. It was with this clicking oculus that Senator Snoke scanned the crowd, looking for his General.

Catching sight of him, Snoke came up to meet them, lips splitting in his usual sarcastic, almost predatory grin, wide at the right and frozen small on the left. He was not a tall man but was nevertheless a man of towering presence, sharply dressed in vest and trousers, collar unbuttoned beneath his cloth-of-gold greatcoat. His hair was gray but still coming in thick and curly, sticking up on his head. His beard, where it was not inhibited by his mask, was groomed precisely. His features held an element of brutality to them -- a snubbed nose and a low brow, slightly pointed ears, chapped and bitten lips. His remaining human eye was as silvery cold as the metal across from it. When the man smiled, Ben saw that half his teeth, as well, were silver.

“Armitage!” Senator Snoke boomed, clapping Hux on the shoulder. “Hope you don’t mind the surprise. I intend to see him off, your dad. He served the Order well. And who is this?”

“Senator,” said Hux. “Meet Ben.”

Snoke took Ben’s offered hand and shook it roughly. “Andy, then,” he barked, “Since we’re doing first names.”

“This is Kylo Ren,” Ben introduced his android as well. Snoke seemed more interested in Ben’s Class 3 than Ben himself, looking the droid over with a low whistle.

Snoke indicated himself with a casual gesture, “This is Face,” he said with a grating laugh. “Though you’ll never address him without addressing me. Come on, then. I’ve gotten us a speeder for the drive to Arkanis.”

They bustled together out into the driving snow.

  
  


Groznyy in winter was, like all Russia, a world of snow and ice. The Sulis Coast however, much like northern Arduinna, was terraformed. The speeder passed by the sign marking the edge of the terraforming, hardly needed, as anyone headed to the coast would suddenly find themselves at this point passing from bone-chilling frost to the tempered heat of a Mediterranean climate. Snow gave way to brown earth populated by dark green brush and tan outcroppings of rock, and in the distance a blue sea sparkled. High in the air, climate emitters gleamed, though no sound could be heard from so far above.

Arkanis Academy was a sprawling estate set far back on the coast beyond miles of idyllic woods. The home itself was a bronze palace that glowed against the ocean beyond. The speeder pulled up in the circle drive out front, and Hux helped Ben out. Snoke, who had taken a front seat, bounded out and halfway up the stairs in front of them, his movements tending toward something brutal as well. Something almost archaic.

“Old Brendol’s body is in an empty gallery beyond the central gardens,” the Senator supplied. “He’s frozen in cryo, fit for an open casket funeral if that suits you.”

“A quick funeral suits me,” Hux called back up at him as he and Ben gathered their bags, “I had planned for none at all but I should hate for you to have left Moscow for nothing. Make yourself comfortable -- you are staying?”

“Oh, not long,” said Snoke, leaving the meaning of that up to Hux’s interpretation. “I’ve got to get back after all, before the Tsarevna has the whole Senate cowering like dogs.”

Ben flinched at the mention of his mother by the man he knew was her greatest opposition. He hoped his reaction wasn’t picked up by Snoke’s roving oculus. He suspected Hux had omitted his last name in their introduction very intentionally.

They entered the Academy, Ben fully turning around to take it in breathlessly. Without any students to house, the spaces were ridiculously large, their ceilings vaulted. The whole estate, while made up of durasteel as most the world was, was done up in bronze and emerald, the walls gilded with intricate prints, every detail of every fixture ornate. It made the wide open spaces feel still homey. The building was a gigantic square, Ben understood, with transparisteel windows on the inside which looked out into what Snoke had called the central gardens. They were lush with flowers and fruit, green ferns reaching up into the air and lemon trees rustling their leaves in the sunlight, casting dappled shadows over the bronze floors inside.

“It’s beautiful, this place,” Ben told Hux.

“Built to the specifications of a woman accustomed to luxury,” Hux responded in good humor, “And it loses some of its charm when it contains memories of exams and drills.”

Hux led Ben around to the backside of the estate, to a series of bedrooms overlooking the cliffs and sea beyond. He installed Ben in one and took the one next to it, and they spent some time settling their things. Privately chiding himself for his inability to be apart for long, Hux called on Ben and they sat together on the balcony, enjoying the warm breeze together and speaking of nothing but feeling that they were carrying on two conversations at once, and that the silent one meant everything.

When the sun started to dip down to the horizon, Hux declared that it was time, and they went together to where Brendol’s body lay entombed in a glowing cryo chamber in one of the darkened and unused rooms. Snoke found them there as though he had sensed it.

“Well?” The Senator asked, smiling in his mean way. “You want to bury him in the ground? That’s what they do up in Arduinna, yes?”

“Yes, in Arduinna,” Hux said indifferently. “But we are in Arkanis. The combustion setting on this chamber will do nicely. There’s room for the whole thing in the gun shed out back.”

“Got any words, then?”

Hux stared in silence at the illuminated corpse of his father for almost a full minute, taking in its face. “None that are kind.”

Snoke laughed at that as though Hux had just told the most capital joke. “If I may,” he said, wiping tears from his human eye, “I have a few.”

“Go on.”

“Here lies Brendol Hux,” Snoke began, voice booming in the expansive and empty Academy. “A man just smart enough to be truly cruel, succeeded by his better on every count. He did not live to see the sun rise on the First Order, and indeed did not grasp the full potential of the glorious machine he helped to set in motion. If there were a God, he’d not rest this soul, so I shan’t ask it.”

Hux leaned forward and hit the button on the side of the chamber, and its innards swirled into superheated white flame. In mere seconds even Brendol Hux’s bones were rendered into ash. Hux didn’t bother to escort it to the shed he had mentioned himself, leaving it to a few household droids to complete the task.

They retired to a nearby drawing room and drank together late into the night, Snoke and Hux speaking energetically about political questions and developments with so much First Order jargon between them that Ben struggled to grasp the subjects. In the morning, Senator Snoke left with the first light for a walk along the coast, refusing even the offer of coffee. Ben was very glad when the man took his leave. There was something deeply disconcerting in Snoke which seemed to spill out from him and darken the room, and the atmosphere in Arkanis was lifted as soon as he exited it.

Ben, for his part, did take Hux up on the offer of coffee. They drank it strong and black, at a transparisteel table in the garden, listening to the melodic calls of the tiny little 1/oiseaux which pollinated the plants. Hux had abandoned any hint of regulation clothing today, wearing a white-button down left partially open and grey trousers. Ben found it hard to look away from him.

 _What right has he to look at me like that?_ Hux thought fondly, returning Ben’s lovestruck gaze exactly.


	2. THE VOYAGE OF THE SKYWALKERS

At the end of the winter, a medical consultation was being held in the Organa home. A doctor examined Rey, determining the measures necessary to restore her failing health. She had fallen severely ill soon after her birthday, and as spring came on she grew worse.

For more than an hour the physician ran his Class 1 devices along every inch of Rey Skywalker’s flesh, checking her mouth and ears and nose as well. The doctor flicked on his 2/prognosis droid and fed into it all the data gathered by his Class 1s. The wise little machine ran its analysis while the doctor looked at his 1/horloge and thought about an opera he’d just seen, and then it beeped with its report.  Throughout this process Leia Organa hovered anxiously nearby, as did Rey’s father and a rotating assortment of characters that the doctor had begun thinking about as yet another opera, one he was decidedly less interested in.

“Well, doctor?” Leia said, not for the first time.

Threepio, wringing his golden hands next to her, said, “Oh yes, tell us please. What hope is there? Is there hope? Oh my!”

Rey lay prostrate on the sofa, her little Class 3 cuddled in her arms. She felt acute embarrassment at her own frailty, wanting more than anything to leap up and declare that she felt just right, but unable to do so. She was overcome by bouts of vertigo that left her shaky and nauseous, powerless to do anything but lay still and be comforted by her droid and her attentive fiances. The doctor smiled, reading the report displayed to him on the droid’s interface, and began asking Rey the same tiresome questions.

Porg sat up on Rey’s stomach and fixed the doctor with his wide eyes, sensing an opportunity to be of use to his mistress. “Excuse me, doctor,” the tiny droid said in its sweet soprano voice, “But there is really no object in this, for this is the third time you have asked the same things.” Rey looked down with wide-eyed gratitude at this intercession, experiencing for the first time that feeling of bone-deep kinship between a human and their beloved-companion.

The doctor did not take offense, bewitched as everyone was wont to be by Rey Skywalker and her lovely little droid. “Begging your pardon, Miss Skywalker,” he said. He recommended that Rey go abroad and partake in a healing retreat aboard an orbiter, and so it was that the Skywalkers marked the changing of seasons by giving up their terrestrial moorings. They travelled the short distance to the Moscow launching station and boarded the Falcon, at which point Han and Chewie piloted them skyward. Thus were the Skywalkers blasted into space.

  
  


The political society of Russia in the year 6240 was one in which everyone knew everyone else and everyone visited everyone else. It of course had its subdivisions, with those loyal to the Republic most familiar amongst themselves and much the same with those loyal to the First Order. At thirty-four years of age Armitage Hux found it difficult to recall the feeling of almost-awe he had once held for these persons in politics who were together responsible for the management and advancement of technology and therefore society, and for the welfare of all Russia. By now he knew them all as one knows their neighbors in a country town; he knew their habits and weaknesses, and where the shoe pinched each of them. He knew their relations with each other, knew who was for whom, and how each maintained their position.

Hux received many communiques from friends in the Order also residing in the south, inviting him out and inquiring about visiting him at the Academy, and he eschewed them all. Senator Snoke’s presence sapped him of all energy to accommodate other politicians. He had remained now four days, and Hux felt that he must leave soon, and he tired of waiting for it.

He looked forward to the moments he got with Ben alone, each time experiencing a surge in his heart of that feeling of quickened life which had come upon him that day at the Grav station, when he had seen Ben for the first time. He was conscious each time that Ben’s tentative smiles brought out the same in him, along with a delight in his eyes he couldn’t quench, and for this reason he hesitated to meet Ben’s eyes in front of Snoke, though he felt the Senator saw all. Hux thought, entirely in spite of himself, that the mutual pursuit between himself and Ben now made up the whole interest of his life.

On this, the fourth day, Senator Snoke announced his intent to leave as they sat together in a drawing room, a transparent smoky blue tea set between them. “But first,” he said, “A game!  _ Scorpio! _ ”

A Class 3 android, tall and thin and colored pale blue, toed daintily into the room.

“A decom?” Hux asked.

“Precisely,” Snoke said. “Owner died without an heir, poor thing. Now, this game is the life of the party in Moscow, you’ll see. Give her a task would you, she’d be panting for it if she could.”

Hux removed his gloves and held them out, and Scorpio leapt into action, taking them and folding them neatly, pathetically grateful for the small assignment. Typically, decoms were deactivated within hours of their obsolescence, and Hux did not have the slightest idea how Snoke obtained this one. Surely not through any legal means.

“I call it the One-or-the-Other Game, and I think you’ll find it a considerable amusement,” Snoke said, fixing his eyes on Ben.

“A game!” vocalized Scorpio with pitiful eagerness. “How  _ delightful! _ ”

“Young Ben here will take those gloves from you,” Snoke said, and the android rushed to obey, offering the gloves to Ben, who took them. Snoke drew a handkerchief out of the breast pocket of his vest and held it aloft. “Now this, Scorpio, hand this to young Master Ben as well.”

The droid did so, saying cheerily, “Here you are, Master Ben!”

“Ben,” Snoke said, voice taking on the same quality of authority that Luke’s sometimes did, the quality that Ben was loath to disobey, “Blindfold Scorpio, please.”

Scorpio obligingly lowered herself to her knees so that Ben could do so without standing. “I love games!” she said.

Snoke raised his eyebrow -- the one he could raise -- with wry amusement, and addressing Ben and Hux, said, “We shall measure this Class 3’s fidelity to the Iron Laws today, gentlemen.” He snapped his fingers, and one of Arkanis’s household droids brought in a steaming chalice on a tray. “This is a superheated humectant used to lubricate gears in industrial settings. Scorpio, I will place this chalice in your hand and you will hold it.”

“Yes, sir!”

“Good. Now, put your other hand into the chalice.”

The robot did so, but then as the heated substance hit the delicate lacing of sense receivers in her end-effector, jerked it back with a shocked static sound.

“No, leave your hand in place, Scorpio,” Snoke commanded with a smile. “Be still.”

What was visible of Scorpio’s face-plate contorted in evident pain, and for a moment it seemed uncertain whether she would obey the Iron Law demanding her self-preservation, or the one which required her obedience to command. But then the robot’s struggle faded, and she plunged her hand again into the humectant.

“Now stay there. Stay where you are.” Snoke barked, the human side of his face gleeful.

“Yes, yes of course,” the decom responded with difficulty, voice box emitting static still. “Stay stay stay I will stay.”

Ben watched it with horrified fascination. The robot was now shuddering in torment, emitting pitiful sounds, but determined to obey.

“You are changed since your time in Moscow,” Snoke said lightly, addressing Hux.

“Changed? Not I.”

“Yes, it’s so.”

Hux was agitated, turned away from Snoke to look at poor Scorpio. “I’ve had enough of this,” he said.

“Yes, it’s time for the next test.”

“No, enough tests. You’ve proven her fidelity. Scorpio, you may set that chalice down.” Hux told her, and the robot obeyed with trembling relief.

Snoke ignored his objection, bringing forth a Class 1 device called a bolt-shot, and pointing it at Scorpio. As dozens of tiny bolts of electricity hit her metal thigh, the Class 3 jumped back, and Snoke ordered her still again. The machine’s struggle to do so was obvious, and as a second round hit her she turned as if to flee.

Snoke shouted, “ _ Stay!  _ Stay in place!” Scorpio did so. “Ah see now? Even machines have their honor.”

“I often think men have no understanding of honor, for all they talk of it,” Hux replied sharply.

“I don’t quite understand the meaning of your words,” Snoke said indifferently, running his tongue over his lips, eyes fixed on the robot as he shocked it. “Young Ben here is amused, is he not? Perhaps he and I are heartless together, General.”

Ben wrenched his gaze away from the robot, looking at Hux, hoping the man didn’t think him heartless, and cursing Snoke in his head for bringing this sadistic game here.

“Shy now, Ben?” Snoke taunted.

“I can’t abide this any longer!” Hux cried, and setting Millicent aside, he skirted the coffee table and put himself bodily between the reverberating bolt-shots and the decom, protecting Scorpio’s form with his own and shouting into the robot’s face, “ _ Move! You may move! _ ”

The robot danced away, and for a sickening time Snoke did not release his grip on the bolt-shot, holding Hux in the painful snare of the arcing electricity.

Ben jumped to his feet, made to grab Hux’s arm, and faltered. He would only extend the electrocution to himself, and he was suddenly, horribly sure that Snoke would hold them fast, grinning at them in the blue light of the bolt-shot until they fell dead. In fact he felt he could not move. With the red light in the center of Snoke’s oculus swiveled toward him, he felt entirely caught in place as though gripped by a giant invisible hand.

“ _ STOP! YOU’LL KILL HIM! _ ” Ben screamed. Finally Senator Snoke stopped shooting and the room fell into terrible silence. The game was over, and Hux was hurt. He collapsed to the floor, clutched at his leg, and rolled onto his back with a grimace of pain.

Snoke dialed up the bolt-shot and aimed it at Scorpio’s head where she cowered in the corner, blowing a hole straight through it. He snapped his fingers again, twice, summoning household droids for clean-up.

“You ought to be more careful, General,” Snoke said, settling back into his chair, color risen in the human half of his face. “I must warn you…” and here he paused, as if giving someone else a turn to speak in an ongoing conversation, and then continued, “I must warn you,  _ through thoughtlessness and lack of caution you may cause yourself great harm _ , and thereby harm the Order. The latter, I will not stand.” Having said his piece and seeming satisfied with it, he brought his left hand up and reflexively tapped his chin with a fingernail --  _ clink clink clink _ .

“Don’t do that in my home,” Hux groaned from the floor. “I dislike it so.”

“I must be off,” Snoke informed them, clapping his hands down on his knees and standing. “The next time we meet, General, I do think I shall have another game for you. Ben, it was captivating to make your acquaintance, and that of your  _ splendid _ android.  _ Kylo Ren _ ...yes, lovely.”

  
  


With Snoke’s exit and the quiet hum of his speeder pulling away, Ben felt that he could move again. He rushed to Hux’s side, cupping his face, feeling down his thigh to the point where he yelped.

“Kylo, vibroblade,” Ben said, and with the glowing knife cut away the fabric from Hux’s electrical burn.

“I want you to go back to Moscow,” Hux told him, gritting it out of clenched teeth.

“You don’t mean that?” Ben asked.

“I know no peace and so I can’t give it to you,” Hux told him.

“You think I’d have it apart? I can’t be apart from you. Kylo, bacta gel.” Ben applied the cool gel carefully to the angry red burn on Hux’s thigh, watching it be soothed and lightened under his fingers. “Don’t you know you’re already all my life to me?” Ben added, searching Hux’s eyes.

Hux strained every effort of his mind to say what he ought to say, but his eyes rested on Ben’s, full of love, and he said instead, “You and I are one to me.”

Ben smiled down at him, his heart racing.  _ I despaired and agonized over nothing, and I’ve done right in coming here, because he loves me. He owns he loves me! _ Aloud, he said, “If you think I’ll suffer at your side, I ask you for the right to suffer.”

“Help me into the garden,” Hux requested. “I think some cool air will finish up the healing, on the surface at least.”

The garden glowed blue in the night, everything in muted shades that ran together like a dreamscape. It was lit by little lumieres, violet in shape and color, which were strung through the tree branches, producing a soft glow as though the entire place were itself a Class 3 bathing its master in companion light. Hux directed them to the center of the place, where there was a squat, broad lounging couch with a white cushion on it fit for an afternoon nap or for stargazing. The lounge was surrounded by low green ferns. The air carried the scent of the lemon trees and of something sweet, some flowering plant.

Once they were settled on the edge of the couch, Hux breathed out a sigh as if he could finally relax, stretching his injured leg out in front of him. Ben still held him close with an arm around his torso beneath his shoulders, unwilling to let go. Hux looked up at the moon, as though acknowledging the people who lived there, and then down at his leg. He poked at the injury, tested it, and made his decision. He reached down to Millicent and sent her meaningfully into Cease. Feeling his heart hammering in his chest, Ben did the same to Kylo Ren.

Hux stood, testing his weight on his injured leg and finding it would hold, and then stripped off his clothes. He stood before Ben, pale, glowing in the night, and when Ben reached for him it was with trembling hands. Ben feinted once, drawing close and pulling away, and then Hux took his hands and held them to his chest. The heat of Hux’s skin under his fingers made this real, this new thing between them, and then Hux was pulling Ben’s clothes from him as well, pushing him back, both their hands roaming across the planes of the other’s body as though memorizing the feel of it.

Hux felt, as he laid Ben back beneath him, what a murderer must feel when he sees the body he has robbed of life. There was something awful and revolting in the selfishness of this, the fearful price of it for both of them. Their physical and spiritual nakedness overwhelmed him, and though he was not a religious man, he felt that he must pray for forgiveness. There was no one in his life now but Ben, so to him Hux addressed this mental prayer. But despite the murderer’s horror before the body of his victim, he must finish it, hack it to pieces. And with fury, as with passion, the murderer cuts apart the body to hide his shame. Hux felt, as he covered Ben’s face and shoulders with kisses, that each one surely must cleave him to the bone as cleanly as any weapon.

He laced one of his hands with Ben’s and held it up, kissing the fingers, holding it against his cheek. He at last ghosted his mouth over Ben’s, and murmured, “This is what’s been bought, this kiss, with whatever suffering comes. This kiss, and this hand, which will always be mine -- the hand of my accomplice.” And he sealed his lips against Ben’s.

It was some time later before either of their thoughts coalesced into sensible phrases again, and when at last they lay together looking up at the sky, Ben spoke. “All is over,” he said, “All that was. I have nothing but you. Remember that.”

Hux took his time in responding, feeling that he could not put into words his sense of rapture and horror and that he did not want to vulgarize it by speaking of it. “For pity’s sake, I can never forget. Now not another word, not a--”

As if to underscore his determination for them to be silent, Hux stopped speaking midway through his sentence. Ben looked at him and realized that it was not just his lovely mouth but his entire body: Hux had stopped moving, locked in place, not even breathing, frozen like a statue.

“Hux?” Ben asked, then more urgently, “Hux, what’s the matter?”  _ It’s him, _ Ben thought wildly, meaning Snoke,  _ Somehow he knows and he’s poisoned him… _ but this was something stranger than poison. As Ben watched, Hux’s body, still frozen as if carved from marble, rose slowly several inches off the couch and hovered in the air.

Ben reached toward him, unsure of how to proceed, afraid even to touch him -- when, as suddenly as it had begun it ended. Hux’s body fell back softly onto the couch beside him and reanimated. In fact, he returned to their conversation exactly where it had stopped.

“-- word more.” Hux concluded. Ben stared back at him blankly, trying to comprehend what he’d just seen. Hux shifted, rolled to his side to mouth kisses along Ben’s jaw, and said the only thing that he thought wouldn’t cheapen the echoing well of his feeling. “I love you. Ben, forgive me, I love you.”

  
  


Three months passed and spring came on, beautiful and kindly and without any treacherous storms on the Sulis Coast. Kylo Ren received many communiques from Threepio, Leia reaching out to Ben, and he read them all but had not yet responded, though he felt terrible guilt in it. The message which finally wrenched a response from him concerned his cousin. Upon reading that Rey was ill, in fact ill enough to be sent into orbit, Ben dictated a rushed response to Kylo assuring his mother that he was safe and requesting further details about Rey’s condition as it developed. He received a flurry of responses at once as he’d known he would, messages delivered to Kylo and frenzied calls on his own comms unit, which he disabled. Wishing to step away from the guilt his parents brought out in him, Ben abandoned the drawing room where he’d been practicing his calligraphy and went out to find Hux on the terrace overlooking the cliffs. Ben took the sandy path there.

Hux was indeed there where he’d gone out to read some hours earlier, now with his book closed. He was still in just his robe as though on holiday, and Ben thought that blue suited him. Hux looked out toward the waves, distractedly watering the plants on the terrace with a Class 1 water-spritzer which sensed the precise amount of mist required by each petal and leaf, and therefore did not hear Ben approach. Hux set down the mister and leaned his forehead against a cool clay pot that sat on the parapet, and both his hands clasped it on either side of his head. The ring on his left hand gleamed flatly in the sun. The beauty of the whole scene, from the sea beyond to the flowering terrace and Hux standing there, his hair bright in the sun in contrast to his embroidered navy robe and his white hands and that lovely golden ring, struck Ben and he paused for a moment to stare in simple ecstasy at what was his.

Ben continued his approach, and when he was within distance to grab for Hux’s waist he did, pulling him against his chest. They stood like that, breathing the salt from the sea below, and Hux leaned his head back on Ben’s shoulder. His face was flushed.

“Are you ill?” Ben asked.

“No, I’m quite well. Too much sun.”

“But you’re thinking of something.”

“Neither you nor I look on our marriage as a passing amusement, yet we go on without officiating it. I know it weighs on you too. It is necessary to put an end to the deception in which we are living.”

“Put an end, how put an end?”

“Submit our request.” Hux had refrained from requesting a marriage license for the two of them from the Republic, as doing so would inevitably alert Leia Organa to her son’s marriage, yet unknown to her. He had refrained on Ben’s behalf, as Ben dreaded telling his family. He could not find the right words yet, he insisted. Whenever Hux had tried to bring Ben to consider it, it was as though Ben would not face him truly and he, the real Ben, retreated somehow into himself, and another strange and unaccountable man came out, whom Hux did not love and whom he feared, and who was in opposition to him. Today, Hux resolved to have it out with him.

“You and I are the only two people who matter,” Ben murmured against his neck, and this was an echo of that other man, the one who confronted him with superficiality and romantic triviality, but today the presence of this hateful stranger was weak. Waning. “What does a license change?”

Hux huffed at him, but tilted his head obligingly so Ben could get at the column of his throat properly. Just when Ben thought that perhaps they would lapse into silence, as they sometimes did, Hux spoke again, and his tone was grave. “Ben, look at me.” He waited until Ben did. “You know I’m of a mind with you. Our life is one as it is, license or no. But my leave is ending. I’ll be called back to the  _ Finalizer _ when the month is out.”

Ben took a shaky breath, leaned down to bite Hux’s shoulder through his robe. His stomach dropped at the news and his pulse hammered. In truth it would vex him equally if Hux viewed their condition too lightly, if he was ambivalent about parting so soon, but still he was vexed with Hux for bringing this problem to light, speaking of the necessity of taking some step.

“Yes, he understands the gravity of it,” Hux told Millicent, who wound her way through the potted plants, trilling. And then, to Ben, “The fault is not yours alone in our delay, please do not think that. Your hesitation was also convenient for me. I do not look forward to hearing from Senator Snoke.” Hux mimicked the Senator’s accent and brought one hand up to cover half his face. “Well, you love a Republic man and have entered into intrigues with him, hm? I warned you and you have not listened to me. Be careful that you do not disgrace the Order, General, and -- and more in the same style.”

“Do you think he’ll try to hurt you?” Ben asked, tightening his grip a bit, feeling Hux’s flesh give under his hands, warm and alive and healthy.

“No,” Hux said, considering, “We’re a long way from Moscow. And he’s nothing to gain from it. But it will attract his attention, which seldom ends well. It’s you I worry for.”

“Once we are married officially you can take more leave?”

“Yes.”

“Then I will tell my family today, and we will submit our request.” Ben promised, turning Hux around in his arms to kiss him properly. Then he confessed, “I responded to my mother’s communiques just now. I’m certain I have hundreds more already. Rey is ill and has gone into orbit for recovery.”

Hux’s eyes widened, “I’m so sorry. Such a lovely young woman, Rey. I hope orbit does her well. I’ll reach out to her myself, if you don’t mind?”

They made their way back to the Academy together, and Hux ordered tea to his favorite sunroom, where they sat together to compose the messages that would bring the world into this place where they had lived and loved alone. Hux, in his part, felt that the turning point he had longed for the last three months had come and that it was impossible to go on concealing things, inevitable that their solace should end, and in the way of men who see inevitable ends to happy times he was more relieved than sad to meet it. 

  
  


On the majestic space vessel orbiting the planet, to which the Skywalkers had taken themselves, like all places in which people gathered, the crystallization of society went on. Though this orbiter was the property of the Russian Republic, admittance was sold to people from all over the world. And as each particle of water in frost takes the form of the crystal in snow, each new person who arrived on the orbiter took their place.

It was characteristic of Rey Skywalker that she viewed people she did not know in the most favorable light possible. Rey wandered the long, illuminated halls of the grand vessel, as it slowly rotated the Earth in the ancient blackness of space, Porg trailing behind her, observing and delighting in her fellow passengers. This massive satellite they now inhabited was an Orbiting Purification Retreat on which the air was carefully circulated through many filters to cleanse it of impurities and maintain maximum recuperative qualities.

Of these people the one who attracted her most was a fellow Russian girl who had arrived in the company of Madame Holdo, who was invalid. Madame belonged to the highest Republic society, but had sustained injuries in the old war against the Empire that weakened her prematurely. Though not much older than Luke, she could not walk and was borne about in a hovering Class 1 device piloted by the girl, named Rose Tico.

Rey and Rose were fast friends and met several times a day, and every time they met Rey said a variation of the same jest, “Who is this? Who is this exquisite creature? For goodness sake do not suppose that I would force my acquaintance on you, but know how ardently I admire you!”

To which Rose always returned in kind such as, “You are very, very, sweet, and I admire you as well, and should admire you better had I the time.” Rose was indeed busy as she accompanied Madame Holdo around the orbiter.

Soon after the arrival of the Skywalkers there appeared on the morning transport two more Russians, and these two attracted universal and unfavorable attention. The pair was made up of a tall man with a stooping figure, nearly skeletal, with the bones in his huge hands fit to puncture the stretched skin, with horrible dishwater eyes, and a rusty Class 3; and his pockmarked but kind-looking companion, who had richly dark skin and was tastelessly dressed. In seeing them Rey had already begun to construct a delightful and touching romance about them. But Luke, having recognized the tall man on sight despite his frightful deterioration, explained to Rey that this was Kuruk Ren. That he’d gone a bad way when her cousin Ben had come to study with them years prior, and that it may be in her best interest to avoid them as Kuruk was a temperamental man, ill-possessed of reason.  Knowing these strangers as once-beloved to her cousin, Rey was saddened by the state of them which was, even to a heart as filled with Light as hers, intensely unpleasant. This Kuruk, with his continual twitching of his head, rattling cough, and clusters of suppurating sores around his eyes, aroused in all who beheld him an irrepressible sense of disgust.

But soon Rey found an excuse to deepen her friendship with Rose, and with Madame Holdo too, and these friendships comforted her. Rey was no stranger to religion, having already found in her Jedi studies an exalted world from the height of which she could contemplate her past calmly. Like her father before her, Rey had given herself over not only to the instinctive animal life most sentients live but also to the spiritual life which connected all living things. This religion, however, had nothing in common with the one Rey had known from childhood. It found expression in late-night services where friends met and learned texts by heart. Madame Holdo’s religion was xenotheologism, the mysterious faith that worshipped light-beings known as the Honored Guests. They were aliens who, Madame Holdo explained rapturously, would travel from the farthest reaches of the ether to redeem humankind.

Rey thought privately that the only confirmed characteristic of any alien species was that they seemed to avoid having anything to do with Earth or humans, but she recognized quickly that Madame Holdo’s faith gave the woman immense comfort, and so she quietly took part in the services, relishing her additional time with Rose.

  
  


Before the end of their recuperative stay aboard the purification satellite, Luke Skywalker in his long robe, with his cheery eyes and graying hair and beard, set off with his daughter down the long, brightly lit passages of the orbiter. Rey had invited him to join her this night, in the company of the xenotheologists. Luke privately made fun of the group, but was, in the same manner as his daughter, unable to truly look upon anyone unkindly, and so he happily accompanied her.

“My, it’s dark here. Nearly melancholy,” he said as they arrived at the dim star-viewing area in which Madame Holdo led the nightly ceremony in front of the wide transparisteel windows. “Present me to your new friends. Who’s this?”

It was Rose, who walked up to them carrying Madame Holdo’s elegant purple bag.

“Rose! Here is Master Luke,” Rey said to her.

Rose made -- simply and naturally as she did everything -- a movement between a bow and a curtsy, and immediately began talking to him, without shyness, as she talked to everyone. Rey saw with glee that her father liked Rose.

“I look forward to seeing Madame Holdo again, if she deigns to recognize me.” Luke whispered to Rey once Rose excused herself.

“You knew her, Master?” Rey asked apprehensively, catching the gleam of irony kindled in Luke’s eyes.

“I used to, in the time of the war. She was great friends with Leia in fact. Before she became a stargazer.” He pronounced the word with a teasing tone, and Rey was dismayed at it.

“Father,” she hissed, forgoing his title. “Be kind.”

“I bear her no ill will, my daughter, I promise you that. Only I know that these xenotheologists look down on other forms of spirituality, Jedi practice included. And I know that Madame Holdo thanks these light-beings of hers for everything, including misfortune. Thanks them too that her wife died, and that’s rather droll, as they didn’t get along.”

“Hush, here she is now,” Rey said as Rose appeared again and guided the Class 1 lev-chair up.

Luke, for his part, approached Madame Amilyn Holdo with extreme courtesy and affability, throwing his hood back and bowing deeply. “I don’t know if you remember me,” he said, “But I thank you for your kindness to my daughter.”

“Luke Skywalker,” Madame Holdo said, and Rey was gutted to detect annoyance from her. “Delighted! I have taken a great fancy to your daughter.”

“You are still in weak health?”

“And used to it.”

“Even so you have scarcely changed these last eleven years.”

“Yes, our Guests send the darkness and the strength to bear it. Often one wonders what is the goal of this life?”

“To do good, probably,” Luke said with a twinkle in his eye. He pointedly did not phrase it as he usually would,  _ to spread Light _ , refraining from bringing Jedi rhetoric into a stargazer place.

“That is not for us to judge,” Madame Holdo said severely.

“I should warn you, while I have your ear: Leia has informed me in passing that the Republic has of late taken an unfavorable view of xenotheology. Some have professed it a nearly Separatist religion. There are rumors of impending arrests. I know she would warn you, were she here, as you were once her dearest friend.” In fact Leia had said more than that: she had her suspicions that the xenotheologists were tied with the First Order, just as she suspected the Separatists were.

Rey and Rose gasped as one. Madame Holdo offered no reply to Luke, turning a cold eye instead to Rey, apologizing and saying that there would be no ceremony tonight, but that Rose would return after piloting her to her chambers.

“Please don’t be cross with me, dear,” Luke said once the Madame had been towed away. “I only warned her as a caution.”

Rose did come back as promised, and Luke let them be. Rey apologized on behalf of her father and Rose waved it away.

“It would do Madame some good to step back from it, probably,” Rose said. “You’ve noticed she never addresses anyone’s Class 3, even your lovely little droid? Stargazers think that relations between Class 3s and humans are bad for us. I had to leave mine with my sister Paige to take this job, and I miss them both every day. Paige gave me this, at least,” Rose held up the silver half-moon pendant she wore. “It’s a Class 1 comms unit with video capability, so I still get to see them.”

Rey was shocked at this admission, having assumed that Rose did not have a Class 3. The simple cruelty of denying a human who served one’s needs the presence of their beloved-companion dampened Rey’s affection for Madame Holdo to the point where she felt it would not return. By no effort of the imagination could Rey bring forth a more favorable image of the Madame. Nor was it necessary to, as five days later the impending arrests that Luke had warned of were set into action. Madame Holdo was arrested by the orbiter’s troop of 77s and denounced as a Separatist. There were rumors aboard that the Republic had made contact with a race of aliens and ruled that the xenotheologists were not in fact religious zealots but conspirators with a foreign power.

Rey was quietly devastated when Madame Holdo was sentenced to death for treason against the Republic. The execution was to be public, and Rey and Rose clung to each other as Madame Holdo was floated to the airlock of an exit dock, removed from her lev-chair, and launched into the cold vastness of space. As Rey watched, Amilyn Holdo froze and became entirely still, floating away into echoing black eternity.

That solemn event, the culmination of her recovery in orbit, changed the world subtly for Rey. She became more aware of sorrow, of sick and dying people, and of the mercy missing in the society in which she lived. To stay on the orbiter suddenly seemed intolerable and she longed for cold air, for Russia, for Finn and Poe and Leia. Her love for Rose was not lessened. As they said their goodbyes, Rey hugged her and begged her to come back down to Russia with them.

“I’ll come when you get married,” said Rose.

“Then I’ll be married all the sooner for that. You promise? Remember you’ve promised.”

The doctor’s prediction was fulfilled. Rey returned home to Russia cured of her illness. While her soul still did not shine so brightly as it once had, tempered by her newfound awareness of suffering, she was serene.

Andrew Snoke’s beloved-companion, his dread Face, had been biding its time. Ever since the machine’s consciousness had first flickered into existence, it had lurked, absorbing the shadows in the recesses of Snoke’s mind, growing, evolving, gaining power.

Now its moment had come.

When the whispers of his star general’s marriage license request reached Snoke’s office, the Face, speaking its cold, searing stream of a voice in his mind, said:

BE MORE OF METAL THAN OF FLESH, ANDREW SNOKE, and so he had, stiffening his spine and suppressing every manifestation of human life in himself. He thought bitterly of this failure of General Hux, the second in his service.

NO HONOR, NO LOYALTY, spat the Face, and Snoke heartily agreed.

“He’s been corrupted,” Snoke concluded aloud, sitting in his office, feet propped up on his desk, alone but not alone.

INEVITABLE. YOU ALWAYS KNEW IT, YOU ALWAYS SAW IT. HIS FORM IS WEAK.

“I tried to deceive myself to spare him. I longed to see his potential as certain. I made a mistake in linking the success of the Order to him. But I made the best choice I could with the information I had, so I cannot be unhappy.”

BUT HE...HE MUST BE MADE UNHAPPY. Snoke had never been so glad for the presence of his machine-thinking attachment, his beloved-companion. Its mechanical eye showed him wonderful mysteries, and its voice demanded he address life’s darker truths.

“Perhaps he can be salvaged,” Snoke mused, “But principally I must find the best way out of the difficult position in which he has placed me. I will find it.” And then, tilting his head and changing the timbre of his voice so that the Face would know he was dictating a communique to General Hux:

“At our last conversation, I presented you with a generous warning. Having been faced with evidence that you continue on a reckless path detrimental to our cause, to which you’ve pledged your life in service, I contact you now to relay the following. Whatever your personal conduct may have been, up until this point your loyalty and dedication to the Order has not wavered. The glorious purpose which you serve cannot be broken by a whim or a vow, and you must go on as you have in the past. I am fully persuaded you shall do so. In the contrary event, you can conjecture what awaits you and your new husband. I trust that you understand.”

This completed, Snoke leaned back in his chair and began his habit of tapping his nail against his metal chin. “Time will pass,” he murmured, “Time arranges all things, and the old habits will be re-established.” The Face nearly buzzed with pleasure at the threat that Snoke had leveled at Hux: to be subject to his will, or be destroyed. “He’s bound to be unhappy of course, but the Order takes precedence to us all.”

GOOD GOOD GOOD, the Face whispered.

  
  


Though Ben had so dreaded unveiling to his parents the reason for and result of his sudden departure from home, at the bottom of his heart he had felt dishonorable in hiding, and it lightened his soul to change that. He opted to write a communique via Kylo Ren to each of his parents rather than re-enabling his comms unit for a call, wanting to explain all without having to talk over them. He made everything clear about his motivations for leaving Moscow -- that he had pursued Hux, that they had between them felt the same, and that they had considered themselves married now these last months, though they were only just now applying for a license. Ben wrote that he hoped his parents would forgive him his unexplained absence and his long silence. Despite the agony of the moment he sent the message, Ben was glad of it. Unlike the flurry of communication before, this time he received no immediate response. He told himself that at least there would be no more avoidance and deception.

Ben passed the rest of that day in good spirits, even amusing Hux by dragging him out and down the stone steps set into the cliff, to where there was a long pier. They shed their boots and sat together, dipping their feet in the clear blue water, catching glimpses of fish in the rocks below.

“There’s a shipwreck a mile out,” Hux told him. “Visible from the surface just from the size of it. A downed star destroyer from the old war. It’s within the terraformed zone so we wouldn’t need coats. I’ll take you out on a sea skimmer if you like, another day.”

“Hmm, I don’t know if I’d like that. It frightens me.”

“The sea?”

“The idea of seeing it. From the surface. I feel as though it shouldn’t be possible.”

“You can see ships in the sky too.”

“Not now, in the daytime.”

“And you can’t see the ones in the sea at night. You’d prefer the ocean floor only be visible in darkness too?”

“Ugh, no that’s worse. We can go if you want.”

“I’ve seen it.”

“You’re already red. We should go back and get you a sun-patch for your nose.”

By bedtime there was still no response from his parents, and Ben sat up a while reading without absorbing a word of the story, waiting on a communique he was beginning to fear wouldn’t come. Hux humored him in this for a while, reading alongside him with a pair of 1/bifocals perched low on his nose. When the hour grew especially late, Hux set his glasses and book aside and turned to Ben, giving him a wordless look that may as well have been a speech. Ben set his book down as well and sent Kylo Ren into Cease until morning. In the Sulis Coast heat they habitually undressed for bed, and Ben pulled Hux to his bare chest, settling his arms around him, relaxing into their shared little movements, their slow, sleepy breaths.

In dreams, where Ben had no control over his thoughts, he was haunted by the same scene almost every night. In this dream Ben re-lived their first coupling in all its passion and sweetness, their eager fumblings in the garden, the taste of Hux’s sweat and the feel of his mouth. But afterward when they lay side by side and that hideous stillness came over Hux, as though he really had died from the arcing of the bolt-shot, he did not reanimate. And then Ben, sitting up to shake him, grabbed his shoulders with black metal hands, and realized that his own human head had somehow been fused onto the body of Kylo Ren.

  
  


When Ben woke up the next morning, Kylo Ren was seated with perfect poise at his bedside, having been switched out of Cease by Hux, and was staring down with calm beneficence upon his master. As Ben opened his eyes he saw his Class 3 there, silhouetted against the morning light. They stared at one another, eyes into faceplate, before Kylo rose to fetch Ben’s robe for him.

In the perfect serenity of the new day, his anxiety over his parents response was out of place. The words had been spoken and he could not imagine what would come of them. “But it’s done,” he told Kylo Ren as the droid slipped his robe over his shoulders. As he fretted and paced about the room, his anxiety deepened into a distinct feeling of dread, reminding him powerfully and unpleasantly of his feeling at the Moscow Grav station, watching the body of the crushed man lifted from the tracks. Kylo Ren then exhaled a static sigh and flashed his eye bank, signaling the receipt of a communique. Ben, trembling, bid him play it. The words that washed over him in Kylo Ren’s steady voice contained the reproach he had feared, but nothing so awful as his imagination had conceived. 

“They’re right that it was evil of me not to speak to them before now,” Ben said to Kylo. “Of course, that’s right. They feared for me and all this time I’ve been safe,  _ happy! _ Untroubled by their pain, vile creature that I am. And of course they can’t understand it. No one understands it except me, except  _ us _ , and no one ever will; and I can’t explain it. They think they’re so high-principled, so upright, but they don’t see  _ us _ . They don’t know how he sees me, how he brings the crushed pieces of me back to life, how he knows I need love.”

Kylo Ren took on a crimson glow, shifting the shade darker and darker embody his master’s wild flush of emotions as he spoke.

“Haven’t I striven, with all my strength, to find something to give meaning to my life? I struggled through every path they put in front of me and each time I fell short. Not a pilot, not a Jedi, not a politician. A mecanicien in a city teeming with them. A smuggler. Stars above, Kylo, you saw Mom’s face when she found out. It was as though I’d killed someone. No partner, no children, too ugly to make a match for.  _ And then! _ And then I looked at him and I knew the time had come where I couldn’t cheat myself any longer, that I was alive, that I deserve the same happiness afforded to others, that I was built to love and be loved. I can’t repent that I breathe, that I love. They know that. Yet still they ask it of me, they ask me to bow and scrape...I will do it for having shut them out, but not for loving my husband.”

Ben collapsed back on the bed, and Kylo Ren gathered him up, holding him close. Ben’s tears poured into the metal lap of his beloved-companion.

  
  


Hux was a man who liked reliability. He liked to know, for example, that all of his weapons were in proper working order at all times. So, once a week, he would shut himself away as much as his situation allowed to clean his blaster and rifle and hot-whip, from grip to muzzle. He found the process immensely satisfying.

This morning, Hux awoke early, switching on Kylo Ren in case Ben woke before he returned, and without shaving or bathing, he sequestered himself in his father’s old study. He distributed his weapons around him and set to work. Millicent padded happily between squares of sunlight on the floor, purring, ready to be of use if needed.

As he worked, Hux considered the complexities of his life. He felt it was essential to account for all variables and define his position moving forward if he were to avoid any...difficulties. The thought brought an unpleasant smirk to his face, one that would have sent his crew running had he been on the bridge of the  _ Finalizer _ . “Millicent,” he said, “remind me later…”

She chirped at him and sat ready, the pre-programmed phrase activating her note-taking function.

“Ben Solo’s safety is of the utmost importance. Senator Snoke has made an implicit threat against that safety should I fail in my duties to the Order. I intend to take additional leave upon the granting of our marriage license, so it is prudent that we remain alert in the coming months, should that be viewed as a breach of Snoke’s expectations of me. Set a reminder for perimeter checks in the evening. Five o’clock? And bar access to the front gate or the pier except through my approval.”

Millicent chirped again, an affirmative.

Hux found all his weapons in excellent condition: his blaster unloaded its pulses at the plasma-absorbing target in the corner at the rate of sixteen per second, twice the regimental standard. At the pressure of his thumb on the hilt, his hot-whip leapt forward like an extension of his arm, snapping across the length of the room in all directions.

Hux’s life, now particularly happy, had never truly been unhappy because he had a code of principles that defined what he ought and ought not to do. This code of principles covered only a very small circle of contingencies, mostly military, but because Hux had never strayed from that circle, he had never had a moment’s hesitation about what to do. In his own mind and to Millicent, he jokingly referred to his principles as his “Bronze Laws” in winking reference to the Iron Laws that regulated robot behavior.

Hux’s Bronze Laws were a set of invariable rules: that one must never hand down a punishment which they could not both endure and inflict themselves, that one must never pardon an insult but may give one, that one must never tell a lie in active combat but one may in peace; and so on. It had occurred to him before that these principles were perhaps not reasonable and therefore not good, but they were at least of unfailing certainty, and so long as he adhered to them, Hux felt that he could hold his head up. Only recently, in his relations with Ben, had Hux begun to feel that his code of principles did not fully cover his life, and that in his future he could find no guiding light.

He sighed and turned to the rifles on the wall of the study, including his father’s much-loved shoulder-mounted  _ Disruptor _ . One by one he went down the line, disassembling the rifles with practiced ease, inspecting the connections, slicking the moving components with fresh humectant, and snapping them all back in place.

The familiar and repetitive actions cleared his mind. Ben was an honorable man who had bestowed his love upon Hux, and Hux loved him, and therefore he was in Hux’s eyes a man who had the right to the same, or even more, respect as any other lawful military spouse. He would have had his hand chopped off before he would have allowed himself by a word, by a hint, to humiliate Ben, or even to fall short of the fullest respect a husband could look for. Having no means of retaliation against Snoke for threatening Ben burned at him.

Hux selected the  _ Disruptor _ next and leveled it, too, at the target in the corner. He paused before firing. From the moment that Ben loved him, he had regarded his own right over Ben, his right  _ to Ben _ , as unassailable. Senator Snoke was a superfluous and tiresome irritation where Ben was concerned. The man nearly single-handedly financed the First Order and thereby held great sway over Hux’s military operations, but who was he to dabble in Hux’s personal life, truly? Hux squinted, aimed, and pictured superfluous and tiresome Andrew Snoke standing in front of the target, imagined the smirking half-metal face. He did not squeeze the trigger.

He set the gun back down with a heavy sigh. Andrew Snoke was no ordinary Senator, Hux knew that much. He had powers figuratively greater than any Hux possessed, and perhaps had power literally too -- the memory of the game bothered Hux frequently. Not of the torment and execution of the droid, although that too, and not of his own electrocution, although that too, but of Ben standing frozen. Frozen and pulled back only an inch along the floor, boots skidding, as if by a large invisible hand. Had it been an imagined inch? Hux didn’t think so. It seemed horribly evident, to Hux, that Snoke had stopped Ben cold and pushed him away with only a glance.  _ What in God’s name is he? What sort of creature? _ Snoke would have to be navigated carefully as Hux took on this new life with Ben.

“Ten o’clock already,” Hux murmured, and made his way back out into the larger world of the house in search of Ben. Hux made a round of the first floor and found it empty, walking leisurely through the beams of sunlight that came in from the garden. This very day, bright and serene, which had so clashed with Ben’s mood, fit Hux’s perfectly. He felt a physical sense of joy in his body. He enjoyed the movement of his sinews, the slight ache in his back from having bent over the rifles as he worked, the remaining deep tenderness of the electric burn on his thigh as he took the stairs back up to the bedroom. Each sight and scent of the day struck him as particularly pleasant. “I want nothing but this happiness,” he told Millicent, who meowed her agreement. “As we go on, I love him more and more.”

He found Ben out on their balcony, seated and turned away. His face was hidden, but Hux drank in with glad eyes the slope of his shoulders, the setting of his head, the slight movement of his breath, these motions peculiar to Ben alone. Joining him, Hux pressed his hand tightly.

The set of Ben’s face was somber. In the corner of this bedroom there had been since they arrived a potted tree with twisting limbs and large, overhanging emerald flower buds. Ben had moved it to the balcony, hoping some sun might open the flowers. The tree had an unfamiliar and vaguely foreboding presence, which in this moment seemed in keeping with Ben’s expression as it stood behind him. Hux knew at once that something had happened, that Ben had heard back from his parents. For all the simple joy in life he’d felt just a moment before, in Ben’s presence he had no will of his own: without yet knowing the exact grounds of Ben’s distress, he already felt the same distress come over himself.

“What is it?” Hux asked, trying to read the thoughts in his face, giving his hand another squeeze.

Ben waited a few beats in silence, leaning his head back so that an emerald petal came free in his hair, gathering his courage. “This morning,” he said, “my mother wrote me back.”

Hux had been leaning forward, unconsciously hunkering low as though hoping to soften the hardship Ben was going through, but as soon as he heard this he drew himself back up, and a proud expression came over his face, momentarily darkened by something colder. “Yes! That’s good, that’s much better. I know how painful it was for you to write them, Ben.”

But Ben was not listening to his words, he was watching his face. Ben could not guess that the moment of cold disdain was produced by Hux’s recollection of his communique from Snoke, as Hux had not shared that message with Ben. To Ben, it seemed only as though Hux were resenting something in this, the completion of the very thing he had long asked of Ben.

“It wasn’t painful,” Ben said irritably. “It had to happen, so it did. And see…” with a brusque gesture, he beckoned Kylo Ren forward to read his mother’s communique again for Hux.

Hux waved Kylo silent before the droid had scarcely begun, an act of casual ownership that shocked Ben. “I understand, I understand,” Hux said, understanding little, only trying in vain to soothe him. He reached over to cup Ben’s face and leaned in awkwardly for a kiss. When they broke away, Hux happened to glance above Ben’s head and observed that one of the tree’s emerald buds had suddenly blossomed -- the flower was open at least, and Hux was fairly sure it hadn’t been. The inside was a shocking fluorescent peach. He’d have noticed, wouldn’t he?

“Ben,” he began, and then fell silent, staring at the flower as a thick stream of pink fluid, like candy syrup, emerged from the center of the bell of the flower and poured down the bottom petals. Ben scowled at his distraction, and he shook his head and focused his eyes back on Ben’s. “The only thing I want is to devote myself to you--”

“Why do you tell me that?” Ben asked crossly, “Do you think I doubt it? If I doubted--” He stopped, reaching around to the back of his neck with a grimace of disgust. His hand came away sticky with pink.

“Come this way, it’s that plant,” Hux said, and now that he was looking again he saw that the open flower was gushing thick mucous streams down to the balcony, and that more buds were opening. Kylo Ren swept in to clean his master up, but when the droid took Ben’s hand in its own, it pulled back with a harsh burst of static just as Scorpio had done with the chalice. The sensors in the droid’s fingertips were sizzling and shorting audibly, smoking in the late morning light where they had brushed against the flower-sap on Ben’s skin.

Ben cursed. Hux bounded across the room to wet a towel in the sink and ran back with it, ready to dab at Kylo Ren’s hands himself when Ben said, “ _ No _ , no. Let me. You stay over there, we don’t want to spread this around. Why would the gardening droids pick a plant that eats away at machines?” Ben meticulously cleaned his beloved-companion’s hands and started on himself.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Hux said, and a thin line appeared between his eyebrows as he considered it.

“We’ll need to get rid of it. It doesn’t seem to be eating through the balcony at least. Take Kylo with you, I’ll come in when I’m clean.”

Hux tugged Ben’s droid back into the bedroom, examining its fingers for himself. Much of its hands were molten, and in one spot there was a hole going straight through its palm, poor thing.

Once Ben had determined himself clean enough to come in, shedding his shirt and entering without it, he rinsed himself in the shower, and then, still sopping wet, joined Hux on the bed. Turning to face Hux and looking him squarely in the eye, Ben said, “I cannot lose my family.”

“I am prepared to make every effort to welcome them here. If they object to me--”

“Stop. Don’t you understand that from the moment I loved you everything has changed for me? The only thing for me is your love.” His voice shook. “If that’s mine, I’m strong enough. But I cannot lose my family by my own doing.” Ben’s face crumpled then and tears ran down it.

Hux, too, felt something welling up in his throat, and for the first time in his life found himself on the edge of weeping. He felt sorry for Ben, and he felt sorry he could not help him, that he was to blame for his wretchedness. In his nightmares he could not escape the feeling that he had wronged Ben in loving him; the feeling now solidified in his waking mind.

He didn’t have long to dwell on it, as in the next second Ben was pulling him from his clothes. Hux objected teasingly and then laughed, nearly shrieking when Ben pinned him. Ben’s wet hair, grown out longer in their months here, dripped on his skin and stuck unpleasantly to his face as Ben mouthed at his neck.

“Want you,” Ben murmured against his skin.

“How?”

“Every way.”

“How, currently?”

Ben had been steadily moving down Hux’s stomach, big hands pulling down his trousers, and then he stopped and pulled away, distracted by the scar tissue on his thigh. Ben ran one of his hands over it, face clouded.

“I’m alright,” Hux told him gently. “I did it to myself. Who jumps in front of a droid?”

“I love that in you,” Ben said, meaning it deeply. “I only wish I’d twisted Snoke’s head from his neck afterward.”

“Never mind that, come back up here and give me a proper kiss.”

Before Ben could, Millicent chirped meaningfully.

“There is someone at the gate,” Hux translated. “Name?” Millicent displayed it. “Ben, there’s a...a Kuruk Ren at the gate, for you? Do you know this man? Millicent, where from? From  _ space _ , really Millicent. Where before that?”

“Moscow,” said Ben. “How did he know where to find me? Never mind, let him in. He’s a very old friend, very dear, and very sick as of late.”

  
  


Kuruk Ren entered Arkanis with a heaving step and a long, wrenching cough, his rusty Class 3 trailing behind him. He seemed a skeleton wrapped in greening white plastic, left out in the weather too long.

Even with Kuruk standing in front of him, Ben hoped somehow that he was not here. He loved Kuruk like a brother, but Ben was anxious about his family and Hux and that blasted plant upstairs, and in this troubled and uncertain humor meeting an ailing guest was particularly difficult. Angry with himself for that base feeling, Ben held his arms wide in cheerful greeting.

“You see, I’ve come to you,” Kuruk said in a thick voice, jerking his scarf off his thin neck and smiling a strange and pitiful smile. As Ben regarded the skin of Kuruk’s face, pulled tightly across his skull and across the horrible welts and pustules below the surface, it moved grotesquely like ripples in a fetid pond. “I’ve meant to see you again, only I’ve been so sick. I’m much better now, though. Back from the orbiter! You’re a tricky one to find."

“Yes, yes! I’m so glad you came!” answered Ben.

Hux spoke up from where he lingered behind Ben on the stairs, having frozen in place at the sight of Kuruk Ren’s condition. “Ben, you haven’t introduced us.”

“Yes, Kuruk, this is my husband Hux.”

“Well I’ll be damned. Thought you’d always be Solo, Ben.” Kuruk said, laughed, and leaned over to hack out a particularly violent cough.

Hux invited them into the drawing room, and they settled onto couches there to chat. In spite of his exaggerated stoop and the emaciation that was so shocking in his form, Kuruk’s movements were as they’d always been, rapid and abrupt. He was also in good spirits, just as Ben remembered him in childhood. He detailed his time on the orbiter to them, including having seen Rey from a distance, and Ben and Hux were enormously relieved to hear that she had seemed in perfect health.

As Kuruk spoke, Ben saw that the flesh-rippling was not confined to his face; his neck, his chest and stomach through his shirt, even his eyes seemed to undulate almost imperceptibly. Ben grimaced and turned it into a manic smile, trying to hide his discomfort from Kuruk.

“Besides,” Kuruk was saying, “I want to turn over a new leaf. I’ve done unwise things, of course, same as everyone else. I don’t regret it. But it’s time to go back on the righteous path.”

Karnak wobbled around the room, his woefully maltuned navigation system occasionally driving him into furniture or walls. There was a perceptible stench of rust and dissolution emitting from Kuruk and Karnak. Millicent wound her way over to the windows in the adjoining sunroom and began pushing them open with her little metal paws, Ben noticed.

After a while, Kuruk suffered a particularly bad coughing fit. He choked more than once, and midway through it almost seemed the man would die here in Hux’s drawing room. Once he was breathing -- laboriously, but breathing -- again, Hux bid him lay down a while and dimmed the lights, retreating to the sunroom himself where the air was fresher. Ben joined him once Kuruk drifted into a fitful nap.

Sitting with Hux’s feet in his lap in the sunroom, Ben’s thoughts were various, but he returned to this: death. Death, the inevitable end to all. It was here, Ben knew, inside Kuruk, in the sounds of him fitfully clearing his throat on the edge of consciousness, every breath wheezing out of choked lungs. It was in himself, too, Ben thought, though quiet. His own death would stay quiet a while longer; today, tomorrow, thirty years. Then it would rear its head.  _ I want so much all the time, I am a black hole made up of want, I had forgotten it all must end. I had forgotten death. _

“It is...inside…” Kuruk rapsed from the other room as if he had heard Ben’s thoughts, and Ben jumped.

“What do you mean?” Ben called.

Kuruk twitched where he lay, not awake but talking from the depths of a nightmare. Ben shuddered, turned away again. His hand found Hux’s knee and squeezed it thoughtlessly as they lounged together on the window-seat where Kuruk’s smell was tempered by the breeze in from the garden. Ben had hardly answered the question of how he wanted to live when a new, insoluble question presented itself: death.

Kuruk did not wake fully again the whole day, continuing to moan and shudder and call out from the depths of his slumbering consciousness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love Admiral Holdo, but there are only so many characters and I needed a xenotheologist. Anyway, the plot thickens. Tune in next week for yet more questions, perhaps some answers.


	3. THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SOUL OF A MAN

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome back! The # of total chapters to come changed because I combined some shorter ones. Kuruk Ren's death is rather grisly, just a warning.

Ben and Hux, granted their marriage license through the Russian Republic, continued living in the Academy as husbands and met every day, and some days they felt that they knew the other better than themselves, and some days they were complete strangers to one another. Kuruk Ren stayed on under their care over that summer, and Hux procured a medical droid for him, but this was a position of misery for all three. Not one of them would have been equal to enduring this position for a single day if not for their expectation that it would change. Kuruk, in his lucid moments, was entirely convinced that he would recover again as he’d seemed to on the orbiter. Ben, on whom this position depended and who was most miserable in the house, endured it because he hoped, as he repeatedly expressed to Kylo Ren, that all would very soon come right. Hux followed Ben’s lead and hoped too, that something apart from his own intervention would solve their difficulties.

Hux endured that season a particularly brutal cull of the First Order’s ranks of officers, which was unusual in itself as a warm and willing body is always better than none, and was made extraordinary because of the whispers from the top down of a new and serious threat to society, the details of which were murky. But the Order demanded all soldiers prepare themselves to face it. Having survived the cull, Hux was in closer contact with his officers, almost feeling that he had taken a leave to work remotely rather than to enjoy his new matrimony. When he slept it was more fitful than ever, his dreams increasingly disorienting.

Last night he had found himself knocking on the Organas’ door back in Moscow, expecting Ben to answer. But when the door was flung open, he almost ran up against Senator Snoke. The lumiere in the hall threw its full light on that Face, flesh half-concealed beneath the gleaming, sunken alloy mask. Snoke’s fixed, dull human eye seemed to look through him. A long moment passed, and Hux bowed -- rather, tried to bow, and stopped short, feeling himself unable to do so. His body was held fast by an invisible force. The telescopic oculus starkly protruded from Snoke’s Face as the man stood, biting his lip, the red glow within what passed for his left eye directed straight at Hux. The grip tightened slowly, constricting, and then Snoke stepped aside. The force yanked Hux forward and slammed him down on the hall floor. Snoke stood, calm and composed, staring down at him like a jeweler examining a stone. Then, without a word, Snoke turned and left him.

Waking in a cold sweat, Hux had bolted upright in bed, pulling in gasps of sweet air. He’d said aloud to Millicent, who was in involuntary Cease and couldn’t hear him, “How the hell did he _do that?_ ” At the sound of his voice in the silent room Ben had woken, mumbling half-formed questions at him, and Hux had reassured him it was nothing, apologized. Ben slept again, but Hux could not.

  
  


Ben and Hux had transitioned to spending as much time outside as they could. Autumn came on and it was cool enough now to abide long hours under the sun, and there seemed to be no part of the vast house that Kuruk’s coughing did not reach. Ben felt some guilt at leaving his old friend inside for hours only with droids, but he’d felt within himself that old deep well of anger stirring, and knew he shouldn’t fray his nerves listening to that wracking cough, lest he pitch a fit of his own. One to rival Kuruk’s old tantrums. For all of the man’s senseless debauchery, even between the two of them it was Ben who felt the greater call to the Dark. His Jedi practice had, against the assurances of Luke, strengthened that call rather than dimmed it. Whenever Ben had sunken himself into his meditations he’d invariably found himself in a pitch-dark pool, not high above a sunlit world, as Rey described her own experience.

As Ben sat across from his husband on the terrace or in the garden, or in the evening near the fire pits on the cliffside, he had taken to observing him. He knew that Hux was aware of his long, profound looks. He’d been amused and then irritated and by now simply accepted them, carrying on as though Ben wasn’t there. Ben was, every time he saw Hux, making the picture of him in his mind match up, rendering it perfect. And in appearance, it was. Ben was starting to feel that his mental picture of Hux’s attitudes and habits was incomparably superior. Impossible in reality. This, too, made him feel guilty.

“You had a call yesterday. Captain Phasma?” Ben asked. They were seated today on the bench built along part of the terrace wall. Hux glanced up at him from the book he was reading -- something on the history of Naboo, the meditarranean realm that Ben’s grandmother had been from, and the place after which all of the Sulis Coast was modeled.

“Mitaka.”

“It lasted a long while. I thought you wouldn’t come to bed.”

“God, that was insufferable.”

“You don’t like him?”

“I do. It’s just...he’s planetside right now.” Seeing Ben’s confusion, Hux added, “He’s behaving exactly as Lieutenants do when they are planetside for the first time in a while. Clubs, gambling, houses of ill rapport. It’s tedious to hear of.”

“Why so? If that’s the life all young soldiers lead.” Ben said, knitting his brows.

“I moved on from that life years ago,” Hux said, guessing at what the change in Ben’s face meant. “And looking back, even then, I didn’t like it.”

Ben looked at him with shining, hostile eyes. A look that months prior would have been strange on his face. Now, Hux was becoming accustomed to it. “Disgusting,” he said, “How is it you can’t understand I’ll never forget that? Especially because I can’t know your life? What have I ever known?” he asked. “What you tell me. And how can I know you tell me the truth?”

“Ben, don’t.” Ben’s nostrils flared at the command and Hux continued before he could interrupt. “That hurts. Haven’t I told you again and again that I’m incapable of creating a thought I wouldn’t lay bare to you?”

“Yes,” Ben snapped. “Nevermind, I’m wretched. I believe you, I believe you. What were you saying?”

Hux couldn’t remember what he’d been about to say. Ben’s sudden swings into extreme jealousy had occurred more and more frequently in the past month, and they horrified Hux. He concealed this as best he could, schooling his face into neutrality, knowing that a show of emotion would only rile Ben more. He told himself that Ben’s jealousy was borne of his love, and that his love was happiness, but Hux was less happy now as they approached a year of having known and loved each other than he’d been months before. He still felt contentment and even joy in his life, but when the sun glinted just right through the trees he was struck by a pang in his heart that told him his best happiness was behind him. That he’d left it behind without knowing and now it was gone. Ben was utterly unlike what he had been when Hux first saw him, and indeed unlike what he’d been when he followed Hux from Moscow. In these moments of animosity between them Hux looked at Ben and knew he’d ruined him. He felt that when his love was stronger, fresher, he could have ripped it from his heart and been done with it, if he’d chosen to. Now that they were both of them settled into this comfortable love and it sometimes ran bitter, it could not be broken. They were bound.

Instead of whatever he’d forgotten, Hux closed his book and said, “No, let’s not go on. Tell me what is the matter.”

But Ben’s mood had shifted, as it did, from anger to melancholy, and he now turned his ire on himself. “Nothing is, except that I’m hateful.”

“Ben--”

“No, I shouldn’t torture you with my darkness. Torture you and myself. We’re miserable here, with my brother, who is here for me--”

“He’s hardly here. Lights aren’t on upstairs, anyway. He’s a cough wrapped in a body.”

“--and it’s intolerable, and sooner it ends the better. It will end. It will end soon and we’ll all be at peace.”

“You think he’ll pass soon?”

“Yes, but that’s not what I mean.”

“I don’t understand,” said Hux, understanding him.

“I feel death waiting inside me too. I’m not sick, I don’t think, but...something. I’m very certain that I’ll die soon, and I’m glad. It will release myself and you.” Ben smiled, and it was sickening to behold. There was no light in his eyes.

Hux stood at once and gripped Ben’s shoulders, standing in front of him and leaning his forehead down to meet Ben’s. “Stop this. Don’t speak like that. It’s not true and it’s...it’s cruel. To you and to me.”

In the melancholy stillness that followed, Millicent jumped up on the parapet and howled at them mournfully, flashing her eye bank. Hux recovered himself, pulling back to meet Ben’s eyes.

“It’s absurd. _Nonsense_.”

“It’s not. I’ve had a dream.”

“A dream?” repeated Hux, thinking at once of his own fearful dreams.

“Yes,” said Ben firmly. “I dreamed that I entered our bedroom, and you would be a while in coming to bed, and I was going to get something from the dresser. I don’t know what, but something, you know how it is in dreams. And in the bedroom, in the corner, stood--”

“Ben,” Hux dropped his society manners, his eyes filled with horror, “What the _fuck?_ How can you believe--”

“Hush, this is important. I know it is. There was someone in the corner, and they turned around, and I saw it was _me_ , only I had on this funny orange jumpsuit instead of my old silver one, and I...the me in the corner, starting fumbling with his vest,” Ben made the motions with his own hands, pawing at his shirt. There was terror in his face, and Hux felt the same terror in himself. “He was looking for something, just as I was looking for something, and he was talking, talking too quickly but it sounded like I was underwater, and I couldn’t understand him. And I tried to wake up, because I knew it was a dream, but I couldn’t. I kept trying and it would just start the dream over and over, and he was talking, but I couldn’t understand a word. It was Kylo Ren who told me, in the dream. He was there too and he said, ‘Master, you will die, you’ll die…’ And I woke up.”

“Vile nonsense,” Hux said, but he glanced at the android shadowing them to see its reaction to what its master had just revealed. Kylo Ren said nothing, but his stance and the tilt of his head spoke to his anguish at having been, even in a dream, a source of pain to his beloved master.

“Never mind, then,” said Ben, “Only I feel better now that you know it too. Let’s go in?”

  
  


It was past five, and the guests were gathered at the Organas’ for dinner before the host herself got home. Finn and Poe were seated in the drawing room, having an animated debate on the Robot Question. They were in complete and hopeless disagreement upon almost every fine point of the subject, and debated it frequently and to no result except for Rey’s chagrin. Poe was a proponent of the Advancement Theory which held that robots should grow in their intelligence and abilities, and that this process should be fluid. That servomechanisms should go wherever their experimentation led them and that they should be allowed to socialize more with humankind, to learn in an organic process. Finn was more reserved, owing to his unfamiliarity with intelligent Class 3s and the remnants of his Order education. He held that if robots were advanced further, the process should be overseen by the Republic to make sure that robot capabilities remained fully understood. Since no difference is more difficult to overcome than a difference of opinion about vague future scenarios, the two never agreed, and were accustomed to jeering at each other without anger.

Luke and Rey sat with them, while Han and Chewie worked in the kitchen, both of them sorely missing Threepio and bickering back and forth about speaking to Leia about procuring a culinary droid.

Leia, upon her entrance, said with an apologetic smile, “I’m not late?” She knew she was, she always was on election day. And this election had held her up more than usual; she’d had to call a meeting of her staff and address them all. Reassure them all that they would continue to advocate their position even in the face of the unexpected election of Andrew Snoke to the office of Chancellor of the Republic. The announcement would not be made to the public until the morning, however, and Leia resolved to allow her family another evening of pleasant ignorance.

“Of course we’re late,” fretted Threepio, already walking quickly in his stiff way to the kitchen. “We invited them for dinner at six, and presently the exact--” his voice faded out as he left the room.

“You can’t help being late,” Luke told her, “You’ve picked it up from Han.”

Leia surveyed the room, her eyes lingering on Rey. It was a delight to see her healthy again, luminescent as she returned from the suspended animation of space.

“Dinner’s on,” Han called, emerging covered in flour, and then added as he gave Leia a kiss, “I couldn’t make sense of that soup you were going to do. It’s flatcakes.”

Leia rolled her eyes at him fondly; she had expected nothing else. Flatcakes were perhaps the only thing Han knew how to cook. Leia could not recall him ever making anything else, he got the rest of his required nutrients from packaged meals and dining out. But, Han Solo was an expert flatcake chef. Perhaps a flatcake connoisseur. Dinner was a success on all counts. The food was irreproachable, and the conversation, shifting back and forth from a general round table to smaller discussions between individuals, never paused. Toward the end it was so lively that everyone rose from their seats and relocated to the drawing room without stopping speaking.

Over the course of the evening the conversation turned to a group session of wedding planning, with everyone throwing out serious and droll ideas alike for the ceremony, and Rey vetoing everything her father suggested with a huge grin on her face.

BB8 rolled in abruptly with a beep, rolling straight into the coffee table and then righting himself and zooming out.

“What’s wrong with him?” Rey asked, voice full of concern.

“Oh,” Poe’s face hardened. He’d almost forgotten. “We were stopped by a man today, on the street. He said he was with the Republic.”

“A Peacekeeper?”

“No, the uniform was different, and he didn’t have 77s. He looked like a First Order man, but he said Republic. BB rolled ahead of me down a different street and this officer detained him, took his information. Scared him pretty bad. When I showed up he said that unaccompanied Class 3s are no longer allowed to roam. They have to have an escort.”

“ _What?_ ”

The entire company was startled by the report. Rey was affronted. “Who was this man, to talk like that?”

The Class 3s in the room looked at the door where BB had exited, understanding only as other droids could the depth of cold mechanical terror BB8 must feel.

  
  


Kuruk Ren steadily grew worse. He’d developed a fever now, and often thrashed. Hux had asked if Ben would prefer that they call a human doctor, but Ben lived in indecision.

“They’ll look him up, and he might have warrants out. And what does a doctor do that a med-droid doesn’t? He brings his own droids and uses them. No, no we’ll wait.”

Kuruk’s moments of lucidity occurred less frequently and lasted precious seconds, but they still came. Most often he called for someone named Ushar, and sometimes he called for Ben, as he did now. He lay in the bedroom next to theirs -- Ben had Kylo move him as soon as it became apparent his illness would not improve, and he had rested there now for most of his stay, attended by dutiful machines. His face was white and blotchy with fever, his eyes were dull, his hands skittered nervously along the tops of the covers like bony spiders.

“Ben, come here,” he called now, and both Ben and Hux went, Hux hanging back in the doorframe. “I’ve no time, I’ve not long left to live. I want to say this: pardon me, if you can, for all the trouble I’ve caused you… I’ll go away where there is wilderness and I’ll be no trouble to anyone anymore.” Here he broke off in his wracking cough, and even it seemed to grow weaker now. Ben said nothing, he only laid his face along the burning arm of his friend and sobbed. He did not sleep the whole night, even when Hux pulled him away from Kuruk’s bedside. The next three nights passed in much the same way, with Kuruk speaking more than he had in the previous month, some of it drivel and some of it lucid and sad, and Ben crying himself into physical exhaustion, sobbing even when tears no longer came.

On the fourth night, once Hux had delicately tugged him away and back to their own bed, Ben had passed out. Without the need to watch him, Hux fell asleep too. But in the witching hours the waves of the sea of unconsciousness pulled away from Ben’s head, and he woke with a start. He sat up on the edge of the bed and leaned his arms on his knees, feeling as though he’d been electrically shocked awake for all the buzzing energy he held. His eyes were wide open. All the heaviness in his head was gone.

Kylo Ren had been put into Cease by Hux, and Ben was alone. “Am I going out of my mind?” he whispered to the dark room, and everyone in it who might have answered was dead to his words. “What makes men go out of their minds? What makes men shoot themselves?” There was again no answer. If Kylo Ren had been active, he’d have restrained Ben and woken Hux. His programming was, like all Class 3s, built to detect threats to his master, including threats of self harm. But he was not, and Ben was left to his own devices.

Ben rapidly ran through his life, not with his accurate Memories stored within Kylo Ren, but with his memories, like a child. They blurred, half-formed, and dissolved. He got up from the bed and walked nude into the hall, whispering to himself as if he were talking to his beloved-companion. “Apart from Hux, what is there? My mecanicien work? No, it doesn’t have meaning. Maybe it did once, in a past life. I think it did. I was unsatisfied but it all had meaning before. Now there’s no reality in it. And Hux...I’m poisoning us. I’m a hateful thing. He loves me less now, I think, and it’s my doing. What end is there for us? I’ll go on corrupting everything good between us until he doesn’t love me at all. This is how men go mad.”

He took the stairs down and padded silently in bare feet to the study on the floor below, almost exactly below their bedroom. In the gloom of the night he looked at the shadowy forms of the rifles on the wall, and then approached the desk. Hux’s blaster was there, cleaned and assembled. Ben picked it up and stood, looking around the room in the faint light of the windows. In the corner stood a form. His heart jumped at the sight of himself. Ben in the corner was also nude tonight, and also held a blaster. Ben brought the blaster up to the right side of his chest and clutched it with both hands. He pressed the muzzle against himself, the metal cold on his flesh. Ben in the corner moved at the same time, placing his blaster against his left breast, over his heart. Ben pulled the trigger.

He did not hear the hot _zap_ of the shot, but a violent blow to his chest sent him reeling. The plasma bolt, at close range, discharged partially across his face as well. He tried to clutch at the edge of the desk, dropped the blaster, staggered, and sat down on the ground, looking around himself in astonishment. Blood ran into his right eye. The blaster hit the floor and discharged another bolt, and this one ricocheted wildly around the durasteel room. It bounced around in a dizzying green light show, knocking items from shelves and breaking the full-length mirror in the corner before landing in the worst possible place: the trunk of munitions along the opposite wall. The subsequent explosion knocked Ben onto his back. The firing munitions activated the feather trigger of the _Disruptor_ and it exploded to life as well, the whole room shaking violently as its six-load plasma bolts detonated one after the other, a string of deafening blasts.

Ben cowered on the floor, clapping his hands to his ears, and then suddenly Hux was kneeling over him, protecting Ben’s exposed flesh with his own body until the firestorm abated. Their ears rang in the sudden silence, and for a while neither moved. Hux was breathing hard, shocked out of sleep by the sound of a territory skirmish in his own home. He’d fallen on the stairs running down them and there were bruises that he could now feel forming on his knees, his back.

Hux was saying something that Ben couldn’t hear. He repeated it like a mantra, and Ben stared up at him out of his clean eye, uncomprehending. Hux’s sweating palm, shaking and cold from nerves, pressed into Ben’s chest and Ben screamed. The pain brought him suddenly back to himself, and the room came back into focus. He smelled his own singed flesh and cooking blood, and the choking smoke of burned objects. Everything less sturdy than the walls had been knocked over and charred. “I’ve got you,” Hux was saying, “I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”

“It hurts,” Ben cried out through clenched teeth, his own hands coming up to tear at Hux’s and then falling back when he brushed his own wound with them.

“Of course it does,” Hux said, and pushed down harder. “Stun bolt right to the chest, no armor, not even a shirt. What were you thinking? Nevermind, I don’t want to know, I’m sure… nevermind, I’ve got you. And Millie’s in Cease! Ha!” Hux snapped then, with his other hand, to summon a household droid to bring bacta in absence of Millicent.

“I saw it,” Ben said, “My death. I saw him again.”

“Well he didn’t do a very good job, now did he? Breathe...there you go. I’ve got you.”

  
  


Having received several anxious communiques from Hux relating to Ben’s recovery from some vague accident, Rey and Finn and Poe traveled from Moscow to pay him a visit. They’d rented a speeder for the drive from the station to the Academy, and as they pulled up Rey shouted in amazement.

Turning to Finn she asked, “Did you go here? To learn?”

Finn shook his head, looking over the estate with wide eyes. “No, they train troopers in Moscow. Officers too, now, but they used to train here. Before the place got shut down. Something was going on with the cadets.”

“What?”

“Whatever it was they hushed it up real quick. Gave the old commandant a new cushy desk job in Moscow. There’s a million rumors. Most popular one is he was having them fight to the death on the property, but who knows.”

“I believe it,” Poe added. “There’s been screwed up stuff happening in the Order since it was founded. One day Leia will nail ‘em. Come on, let’s find Ben.”

They found him in tears. He sat in the sunroom with Kylo Ren hovering nearby. BB8 immediately rolled forward and burbled sympathetically at him, joining Kylo Ren in tending to his emotional wellbeing.

Rey vaulted a couch to get to her cousin, nearly crawling into his lap to hug him. Ben hugged her back fiercely, staining her shoulder with tears. “Ben, your face,” Rey said breathlessly. He had a long scar across the right side of it, pink and healing, from above his brow down the side of his neck and disappearing into his shirt, bisecting his features at an angle.

“I was already ugly,” Ben sniffed, “So it’s no matter.”

“Don’t, Ben. Hey, you’re the handsomest cousin I have,” Rey told him, and he laughed morosely against the fabric of her gray jacket. She fell naturally into the tone that harmonized with Ben’s mood, asking him how he was and how he had spent that morning.

“Miserable,” Ben said shakily, “Today and this morning and all the days to come.”

“Come on, man,” Finn told him, “Rouse yourself, you’ve got to look life in the face.”

“Rouse,” Kylo Ren repeated.

Ben paid them no mind, pulling back to look at Rey. “I’ve heard it said that those in love adore their partners even for their vices, and for me that’s true. But I hate him for his virtues. Do you understand? I hate him when he’s not attentive but more when he is. I love and hate him so exquisitely at once that I don’t know what to do with myself. It’s as though our bond is strengthened by there being something terrible in it.” Ben broke off there with a shaky breath.

“You’re hurt, Ben,” Poe said softly. “You’re hurt and overstressed. Especially with Kuruk here,” And he smiled. No one else in Poe’s place would have smiled; from anyone else, save Rey, it would have been brutal. But in Poe’s smile there was enough tenderness that it soothed. “There’s nothing that lasts forever,” he added.

“Listen,” Rey broke in, sliding gracelessly off Ben’s lap to sit beside him. “You can’t see your position like we can. Let me tell you. You were unattached thirty years of your life, not just unmarried but seeing no one. You weren’t in love, you didn’t know what love is. And then you did fall in love, and you were married, and it’s so incredibly new to you that it seems a misfortune. It will pass. You’re only frightened.”

“I know nothing. Nothing. Except that I can’t stand this.”

“We’re here now,” Rey said. “”How is your health? Tell me.”

Ben pulled his shirt open and the assembled company gasped at the healing burns on his chest, connected to his facial scar which ran all the way down his neck and across his clavicle. The wound had initially been a dangerous one, that much was clear.

“ _Ben!_ ” Rey shrieked, “What happened?”

“Tell them, then,” Hux said from the doorway. It was plain in his appearance that he hadn’t been sleeping -- the perfectly arranged man that Rey had adored in Moscow was gone, replaced by someone with wild hair and growing stubble and wrinkled clothes. There were dark circles under his eyes. Ben hesitated, looked around at them with wide and wounded eyes, lips trembling. Hux made his way to stand behind Ben and put a hand on his shoulder, the other cupping his jaw. “Three days I feared he would die,” Hux murmured, almost more to himself than to his guests. As the trio absorbed that information, Hux leaned down and pressed a kiss to Ben’s temple.

“Orbit was good for you, wasn’t it, Rey?” Finn asked abruptly.

“Oh...yes, I feel better than ever.”

Poe caught on to Finn’s idea, “That’s perfect,” he said. “Take a holiday off-planet and rest up. No one else could bear this as long as you have, being out here by yourselves and then your first visitor is on death’s door. It’s too sad.”

“We can’t,” Ben said automatically. “Kuruk--”

“Will stay with us!” Rey insisted.

“No,” Hux said at once, “You are planning your wedding, and--”

“And there are enough of us together in Moscow to care for him, and we’ll call you if he worsens. We’ll use Leia’s video comms unit so Ben can see him. This is all so horrible for the two of you, stuck here with nothing else. You need to take some time for yourselves.”

“Go to the moon,” Finn pushed. “They’ve got spas there.”

“Yes!” Rey said decisively, and by the strength of her will it was settled. The rest of their visit was spent in comparable joy, and Rey even succeeded in making Ben smile more than once. The first smile was drawn from him by the presentation of their marriage gifts on the first night of Rey’s visit. She had been too excited to wait any longer, and handed them out right after dinner.

Hux’s was a beautifully designed 1/horloge which Rey explained doubled as a private comms channel with her own which would function over any distance, adding that it might be especially useful since he and Ben were sure to leave Earth. Ben’s gift left him speechless. His eyes spilled over with more tears as he unwrapped and held aloft the hilt of a Jedi lightsaber, thrumming with life from the kyber crystal inside it.

“Good or bad?” Rey asked him anxiously, gazing at his face.

“Good,” Ben croaked out.

“If you so much as burn any of your arm hair off with it I’ll take it back,” Rey threatened. By the end of the month, Rey had relocated Kuruk to Moscow with Finn and Poe, and Hux and Ben went to the moon.

  
  


The inner workings of a Class 3 robot are as complex as they are small. As is well known, each of these miraculous automatons contains within itself a self-perpetuating system, a universe of infinitesimal mechanisms. The movement of these interconnected parts is powered by the “sun” that sits at the core of every Class 3. That sun is their kyber crystal, which burns for the life of a machine with furious intensity. It is that remarkable crystal heart that creates the easy, fluid functioning of the companion robot. 

The Higher Branches of the Republic, led by Andrew Snoke, moved forward with their momentous Project. It started with the collection of all Class 3 robots to undergo adjustments, the precise nature of which were not publicized. Worsening the blow was the appearance of the First Order officers assigned to enact the collection. They were _modified_ in ways similar to Snoke himself. In pairs or groups they appeared on doorsteps all over Moscow with no Class 3s of their own. They started in the city center, and at each door inquired firmly as to whether there were any Class 3 robots in the household. They used Class 1 devices to carefully record the name and model of each beloved-companion, and then loaded the droids up into a lev-truck and went on their way.

Anyone who asked questions surrounding the nature of the needed adjustments was told gently that such concerns were the responsibility of the Republic, and wouldn’t we all do well to trust in our leaders? For most, the answer was satisfactory. For Leia Organa and Han Solo, it was not. But she had no chance of continuing the fight against Snoke if she was ousted from the Senate for a spat with his toy soldiers, and so they tearfully bade goodbye to Chewie and Threepio. Chewie wailed mournfully from the back of the truck, and Threepio flashed his eyes tremulously at Leia just before they were out of sight.

The gears of life turned forward, and the time of anxious confusion surrounding the collection of their Class 3s was replaced in the Organa household by joyful anticipation as preparations were completed for the wedding of their beloved niece to her two closest friends. When they arrived at the temple, a crowd of people was thronging around the building lighted up for the wedding. Word of the marriage of Tsarevna Leia’s niece had spread, and all of Moscow lined up for a peek through the window gratings, perhaps making up for the loss of a public ceremony for her son, who in another life would have been their tsarevich.

More than twenty speeders had already been parked in ranks along the street, monitored by 2/policier robots. The guest list had been drawn up to include many of Leia’s society friends, who were entering the temple in front of them, wearing their best robes, dresses, suits, and assorted finery. The outside walls of the temple, programmed for the occasion by a highly sought-after gadgeteer, glowed brightly with painted scenes of the Jedi past, one luminous scene shifting seamlessly into the next. Han and Leia entered the temple and took their seats among the first row, noting to each other _sotto voce_ that the embellishments were perfect -- the dais at the front of the temple was backlit in blue, the fixtures in the room gleamed silver, and high above the crowd, where the durasteel of the walls changed to vaulted mirrors, a grav-reverse had been applied to the level and thousands of daisies floated delicately, shifting and hovering as if through magic. The banner of old house Organa, with it’s silver starbird on a lush blue background, framed the altar.

The only thing missing was the loving threesome. Every time there was heard the whoosh of an opened door, the conversation in the crowd died away, and everyone looked around expecting to see the bride and grooms come in. But the door had opened more than ten times, and each time it was either a belated guest or guests, who took their seat, or a spectator who had avoided the 2/policiers, and stood in the back. There was a Galena box at the back of the temple, and it sent waves of calming oscillation through the room, but it was not enough to dampen the mounting anxiety. Both the guests and the outside public had now passed through all the phases of anticipation. The delay had become discomfiting. At last one of the guests seated near Leia looked at her 1/horloge and said aloud, “It’s really strange!” and at once the guests began expressing amongst themselves their wonder.

Rey meanwhile had long ago been quite ready, every detail of her dress perfect. She was sheathed in a white long-sleeved gown, tailored to her form, with a high neckline and a cut out back. It’s paneled seams were lined with sparkling crystals, and her hair was pulled back behind a tiara but left loose to fall down her shoulders. Her dress was hemmed high enough to show her boots, which were soft gray velvet to match her Class 3, standing beside her. Porg was one of the few Class 3s left in all of Moscow. Luke was currently arguing with a First Order officer who had come into the back room of the temple to request their Class 3s be surrendered.

“They cannot be married without the presence of their Class 3s!” He bellowed at the young man, “Can the adjustments not be forestalled?” The soldier relented after what seemed to Rey hours of bickering, making a note on his device and finally, mercifully leaving.

Finn, standing in his shirt and trousers but not his blue suit coat, rushed to put it on now that the ceremony could proceed. Poe, also granted a forestallment on BB8’s adjustment, gave his droid a thumbs up which it returned using its lighter end-effector.

“They’ve come!” “Here they are!” “How dashing.” were the comments in the crowd as Finn and Poe, flanked by BB8, at last entered the temple and took their places at the altar. BB8 burbled the cause of the delay, and an ex-pilot in the crowd repeated it to his wife, and then the guests at large were whispering it with relieved smiles to one another. Finn and Poe saw nothing and no one except each other and Rey as she walked up the aisle to them.

Everyone whispered, as was the trend in Moscow high society no matter the true case, that she had lost her looks of late, and was not nearly so pretty on her wedding day as usual, but Finn and Poe did not think so. They took in her sparkling tiara, her bouquet of daisies, her high stand-up collar, her figure backlit with a soft blue glow by Porg, and it seemed to each of them that the other two looked better than ever -- not because of their finery, but because in spite of their elaborate attire, the expressions on their faces, in their eyes, were still their own characteristic expressions which to their partners were so beloved.

Luke handed his daughter off to her soon-to-be husbands and took his seat next to Leia, R2 whirring into place beside him. Leia looked on, tried to say something to Luke but could not speak, cried, and then laughed unnaturally. She was more affected than she had anticipated by the loss of Threepio. How perfectly ridiculous, she thought, that she should have no nimble metal fingers to hand her tissues, no strong metal shoulder to lean on, at her own niece’s wedding! She was unable to keep her thoughts from wandering to her son, picturing a hundred different ways which his own vows might have looked, far from home and far from her.

Rey took her place on the altar and looked briefly at Leia, at all of her guests, with the same absent eyes that Finn and Poe had. Another Jedi Master came out, a woman with deep russet skin, facial tattoos, striking blue eyes, and an ornately hooded robe. She introduced herself to the congregation as Master Ahsoka Tano, a disciple of Luke’s late father. She then turned and said something to Finn, who shifted his posture, bowed to the crowd and the Master, and took Rey’s left arm in his. She said the same to Poe, but it took him a long while to make out what was expected of him, he was so flustered. For a long time Master Ahsoka tried to set him right and made him begin again -- because he kept bowing in the wrong order or taking Rey’s arm at the wrong place -- till he at last had completed his movements correctly. The temple became so still that one could hear the faint buzz of the silver 1/lumieres in their sconces.

All eyes were fixed upon the altar, and no one noticed that outside the 2/policiers were motoring in arbitrary circles, periodically colliding harmlessly, a sure sign of having been severely and purposefully maltuned.

Master Ahsoka held her hands up, one open palm to the skies, and one holding two glowing 1/lumieres in the shape of long-stemmed daisies. She put her free hand out and blessed the bride with it, tenderly drawing a symbol on the bowed head of Rey, and then handed the lumieres to Finn and Poe, and took a slow step back.

Finn chanced a glance sideways at his fiances. Looking at their faces in profile, from the scarcely perceptible quiver of Poe’s eyelashes he knew he was aware of his eyes upon him. _Can it be true? Can this really be happening?_ Finn thought, amazed at the happiness of his own life. Rey did not look back at him, her head still bowed in reverence, but her high collar, which reached her little ear, trembled faintly as she swallowed, and her arm shook faintly against his. All the fuss with the soldier, of being late, all the talk of the guests, the presence of the Master -- all suddenly faded away and he was filled with simple, all-consuming joy and dread.

It was this precise cocktail of feeling that triggered the first of the emotion bombs.

It exploded with pinpoint precision beneath the seat of an elderly guest seated in the third pew from the back. The blast unleashed all the destructive potential of a traditional emotion bomb, but all concentrated on this one unfortunate guest, furiously vibrating every molecule in his body and turning his insides to a gelatinous bloody paste. So precise was the blast that even the guests to the right and left of the man did not realize his death, did not realize that the wedding was under attack by Separatists. The guest slumped in his seat, and might have been sleeping, an impolite but not shocking action by an elderly man at a service.

“Repeat after me, young padawan Rey,” Master Ahsoka said solemnly. The syllables rang out over the crowd, setting the air quivering with waves of sound. The brains of the murdered guest, rendered liquid, leaked slowly from his ears.

“The Force is with me, and I am one with the Force. And I fear nothing, because all is as the Force wills it,” Master Ahsoka continued, and the Galena box swelled with music, filling the whole temple from the windows to the vaulted mirrored roof, sending the hovering daisies there skittering around on the waves of sound, and drowning out a lone woman’s panicked shrieking from the back of the temple.

“This man is dead! What has...what’s happened?”

A second emotion bomb ignited, this time beneath a young woman with her head wrapped colorfully in silk. Like the elderly man, she collapsed in her seat, her insides instantly emulsified.

Joy and mystery swelled in the hearts of Rey and Finn and Poe, amplifying the danger for all present. The Master prayed, as was customary, for peace, for the pursuit of the Light, for the long and fruitful lives of the servants of the Force, now pledging those lives to each other. The closer the Master drew to the fateful moment when these three would enter the unknown country of matrimonial connection, the more palpable was the mixture of dread and joy within them, and with every upswell of that emotional tide, more of the quiet bombs went off, each one more brutally effective than the last. Rey and Finn and Poe gripped each other’s arms, lost in tender feeling and contemplation of their entwined fates, as the toll of their love grew every second.

Rey repeated the Guardian’s Mantra, and then Finn, and then Poe. Finn and Poe brought their lumieres together in front of Rey, crossing them, and she passed her hand over the tops of the little machines, at which point their light went out. Master Ahsoka took them back. “The Light lives in you now. In each of you,” she said solemnly.

“May the Force be with you,” Rey told her, as they had rehearsed.

“And with you, my children.” Master Ahsoka responded, and the ceremony was complete. Each of the three, now wedded, took a deep breath.

“Help!” cried a familiar voice. It was Korsunsky. “Oh, _help!_ ” His sister had suddenly jerked in her seat beside him, twisted her body unnaturally, and tumbled into his lap, her ears leaking the dreadful gray and red fluid that had once comprised her mind. Rey wheeled around from the altar, at last beholding the bedlam unfolding around her, becoming worse every moment as dread-joy bombs went off like celebratory 1/flash-pops at a summer birthday party.

The first decisive action came from Porg, who latched on to one of Rey’s boots with his little mouth and pulled his mistress down to the ground, flapping his wings and landing on her chest to squawk at her, breaking the joyful spell she’d been under. BB rolled off into the crowd, beeping shrilly for the unhurt guests to follow him out of the temple, herding them like a little sheepdog.

“Why does it continue?” Rey shouted to Poe, who had leapt from the altar to tend to the wailing Korsunsky and his dead sister. “If this is an emotion bombing...why have they not stopped? If they were fed by our happiness why do they still detonate?” As if to punctuate her statement, another guest began shrieking at the realization that their partner had been murdered.

Finn smiled despite himself, thinking, _She’s so clever, how can she think amid so much death?_ “Oh God,” he said in sudden horror. “It’s me! I’m happy!” He looked about him in horror, marveling at the power of his love, trying and failing to squash it in his breast. Then, Rey lunged at him. She grabbed the thin silver rod that had held up a wreath of flowers on one end of the altar and wielded it as a staff, taking vicious swings at him, her eyes burning and lips set in a fierce snarl. Finn was so surprised at the assault that the emotion bombs at last stopped, giving the crowd time to escape without further casualties.

Twenty minutes later, outside the temple, troops of 77s arrived with their accompanying Peacekeepers, and the married trio gave a statement to them. Within the temple, the helpless victims awaited identification and removal. Outside, the wedding party and their guests wept for the dead, for the aftermath of horror, for the continued plague of the Separatists on society; and the guests wept bitterly that their Class 3s were not there to protect them or to lend them support and comfort.

The violence of her wedding day could not help but impact Rey, changing her ideas about the life she was now to lead. She felt more and more that all her dreams about how she would order her life had been childish, separate from reality, and that her future would be something she had never before understood and understood less than ever, even as it overtook her. Rose approached from the crowd in a golden dress, thankfully uninjured, and Rey clung to her. “I’m so sorry, dear,” Rose was saying as Rey cried in her arms. “I’m so sorry, you’re so lovely, how I’ve missed you.” and then, whispered against Rey’s ear, “It will all come right. Dark rises, yes, but Light to meet it. Have faith, _have faith_.” Rose pulled away and was gone before Rey could introduce her to her husbands.

After supper, the same night, the Skywalkers left for the northern country.

  
  


Hux and Ben had been traveling for a month together on the surface of the moon. They had visited the Mare Tranquillitatis and a settlement famous for its canals and fountains, and had just arrived at a far-side colony where they meant to stay some time.

A moonie, one of the wiry silver Class 2s with long snaking limbs and bulbous white head units, employed in all human-serving positions on the moon’s surface, stood in the hotel lobby giving a reply to a gentleman in First Order uniform in its classical lilting voice. Catching the sound of footsteps coming from its side, the moonie swiveled it’s white head and fixed Hux in it’s icy blue stare. Recognizing the General who had taken their best room, the moonie bowed and informed him that all was arranged.

“I’m glad to hear it,” said Hux. “Is my companion home?”

“Master...went out for a walk...but returned now, yes.” answered the Class 2 in the distinctive pitchy stop-start of the moonie.

Hux ran a hand through his hair, which had grown longer. He still brushed it back, but Ben complained so when he used pomade that he’d stopped. Glancing casually at the gentleman, who still stood in front of the moonie and gazed intently at him, Hux almost moved on.

“This gentleman...inquiring after you.”

With a feeling of annoyance at never being able to get away from acquaintances anywhere, Hux turned and looked at the gentleman, who took a step back sheepishly. Millicent rubbed against Hux’s ankle, taking in the stranger as well. She puffed up her fur-plates, initially distrustful, and Hux clicked at her to stand down, recognizing the man and the little rat-shaped Class 3 on his shoulder.

“Mitaka!”

“General, sir!”

Surprising though it was to see his Lieutenant here, Mitaka and Hux beamed at each other. Mitaka, though younger, had been a comrade of Hux’s in their Academy days, and then they had gone different ways for a while, but reunited when Hux was given command of the _Finalizer_. Even though he appreciated Mitaka as a loyal and competent officer, Hux would never have expected to be quite so pleased to see him. He had not been aware of how much he missed his ship and the officers and troops aboard it. With a frank face of delight Hux took Mitaka’s shoulder. The last hint of apprehension on Mitaka’s face was replaced with the same expression of delight.

“How glad I am to meet you!” Hux said, baring his teeth in what he hoped was an approachable smile.

“I thought I heard the name Hux uttered here, but I wasn’t sure. Well met, sir!”

“Let’s go up. Come, tell me what you’re doing.”

“Digging, friend. Digging and digging and digging.”

“Ah, right,” Now Hux remembered seeing the reports come through his comms unit; there was to be an excavation and extraction of huge tracts of the lunar surface in search of kyber crystals, in the vague theory that if they had mysteriously appeared in Russian soil many hundreds of years ago, they may as well be found here. Mitaka was currently overseeing extraction, as he was certified in it. However, he reported with a sad shrug that all he’d found so far was moon rocks and dust.

“Pity,” Hux said in sympathy, before deciding to broach the difficult subject, which he knew would come up sooner or later with any of his First Order comrades. “Do you know I’m married now? My husband and I are travelling together. I’m going to see him now,” he said carefully, scrutinizing Mitaka’s face.

“Oh, I didn’t know,” Mitaka said, though he plainly did know, and itched to know more. _Decent fellow,_ Hux thought, his fondness for Mitaka growing. _He looks at the thing properly. I can introduce him to Ben_.

During these weeks on the moon, Hux had, upon meeting any First Order acquaintances, asked himself how the person would look at his marriage to Ben Solo, the son of the Order’s most powerful political opponent. For the most part, he had been pleased that they had the “proper” way of looking at it. If he had been asked outright what that “proper” way was, he would have struggled to answer. In reality, those who had the “proper” view of it tended to, like Mitaka, have no view of it at all beyond their respect for Hux. They behaved as well-bred people behave in regard to all the more complex problems in life; they were polite, avoiding allusions and difficult questions. In this vacuum of avoidance, they gave the impression of accepting and even approving of Hux’s position, but of considering it uncalled-for to put into words.

Hux was very gratified to know that Mitaka was of this class of people, and therefore was doubly pleased to see him. And in fact, Mitaka and his little droid Armesto’s manner toward Ben and Kylo Ren was all that Hux could have desired. Without the slightest effort Mitaka steered clear of all subjects that might lead to upset. He had never met Ben or his android before, and was struck by his solemn and frank demeanor, and the physical presence of the man and droid side by side. What Mitaka, who admired Hux more than the other officers on the _Finalizer_ did, who had once been rather sweet on him, and who now saw him as a sort of friend, liked most about Ben was his forthrightness. When met with an outsider in uniform, who could very well be a threat to them, Ben called Hux simply Armitage, and mentioned to Mitaka that they were going to move into a house -- here called a module -- they had just rented.

“It’s lovely out, actually,” said Hux. “Let’s go and take another look at that module?”

“I shall be very glad to; where’s my helmet? And how is the gravity today?” Ben addressed the last to Mitaka, enfolding him in the conversation that way, which both Mitaka and Hux appreciated.

“The gravity is good,” Mitaka said.

Hux saw from the way that Ben’s eyes flickered back to Kylo Ren frequently that Ben did not know what terms Hux cared to be on with Mitaka, and so was afraid of not behaving as he would wish. Hux looked at him tenderly, wishing he could send a reassuring thought over, but the look would have to do. Ben understood that Hux was pleased, most of all that he was pleased with Ben; and smiling at him, Ben located his helmet, patterned after Kylo Ren’s faceplate, and walked out the door. Kylo Ren followed. Hux and Mitaka glanced at each other, and a look of hesitation came over both their faces. Mitaka searched for something to say about Ben while Hux both desired and dreaded him doing so. The moment passed.

They each went through the motions of pulling on the required jumpsuits and helmets to traverse the lunar surface. Ben and his android were true twins with Ben’s face hidden behind his helmet. Hux and Mitaka wore standard trooper helmets. They walked to the module that Hux had reserved, and looked over it. It was a nice one, with all the peculiarities of a lunar module: the strangely shaped windows and fully white interior. Mitaka, eager to be useful and more experienced than Hux with lunar living, promptly took on the role of chief inspector. He carefully examined the sealing systems and hatches, and the oxygen producing unit.

“I’m very glad of one thing,” Ben said to Mitaka when they were on their way back. “Armitage and I will have a capital atelier.” Then he said to Hux, using a rare pet-name as though he saw that Mitaka would become intimate with them in their isolation, and that there was no need to be reserved in front of him. “We should take that module, I think, my love.”

Mitaka turned round quickly to gape at Hux, and was momentarily glad that his helmet obscured it before Armesto gave him away by squeaking excitedly, “Do you paint?”

“I used to long ago, and I’ve begun again a little,” said Hux. “Ben practices calligraphy, and there are only so many books in the First Order catalogue. I believe I’ve read them all. Honestly!”

“He’s very talented,” Ben said happily. Millicent meowed her agreement as she bounded along beside them. “I can judge.”

“How wonderful!” Mitaka said, meaning it.

“Does it surprise you?” Hux asked, seeming properly chastened by having his hobbies lauded in front of his subordinate.

“It’s only that I do, too, sir. Paint.”

Ben exclaimed in excitement at that, and promptly invited Mitaka to join them the second they were set up.

  
  


Ben felt, in casting off the Earth, all the emancipation and repulsion that a drowning man feels who has shaken off another man clinging to him. The other man did drown, and that was evil of course, but it was also the sole means of escape, and better not to brood over it. Ben was unpardonably happy and full of the joy of life. The memory of all that had happened on Earth: leaving his family without a word, Kuruk’s illness, his own bout of madness and blaster injury, Rey’s visit -- all of it seemed like a delirious dream from which he had woken up alone with Hux on the lunar surface.

It was no accident that Finn had suggested they come to the moon, a permissive enclave where judgment, along with gravity, held only a fraction of its usual force. There were all manner of people here. Some had left Russia willingly and some unwillingly, and all had pasts or futures they were running from, and so the couple’s opposing ties had posed no problems for them other than very occasional dampened disdain from people who fell to either side of the political divide.

The desire for life, waxing stronger each day, was so intense, and the conditions of that life so new and interesting, that Ben was nearly manic. Every second he spent with Hux he felt he knew him better and loved him more. Ben loved him for himself, and for his love of Ben. Ben’s complete ownership of Hux was a continual joy. Hux’s presence was always sweet to him. All the traits of his character, particularly those which had pricked at Ben on Earth, were now unutterably dear to him. His appearance -- changed! His hair a bit longer and his form clothed in civilian dress, and he even went a couple days between shaving sometimes, because he knew Ben liked it -- it was fascinating. In everything Hux said, thought, and did, Ben saw something particularly noble and lovable. This adoration sometimes alarmed Ben; in these moments he sought and could not find anything in his husband that was not perfect. He dared not let slip his own sense of insignificance beside him. It seemed to him that knowing it, Hux might sooner cease to love him. Ben dreaded nothing as much as he feared losing Hux’s love, though he had no grounds for fearing it. He felt an awful gratitude to Hux that left him dizzy, because Hux had such an aptitude for a regimental career and had sacrificed his spotless reputation for Ben, and never betrayed the slightest regret in having done so. Hux was more loving than ever toward him, never opposed him, and never deserted him.

Hux, meanwhile, was not perfectly happy. In joining his life to Ben’s he found that the anxiety he had expected in being so invested in another human was a grain of sand compared to the mountain of anxiety he experienced. For a time in his leave he had felt all the delight of the civilian-esque freedom he hadn’t known before, and he had a new sort of freedom in this love, and he was content. But not for long. To put it short, Ben worried him. Hux was always on the lookout for any sign that Ben was lapsing back into melancholy, studying his husband’s every move, analysing him. This recent mania did nothing to dispel Hux’s fear. It heightened it. It seemed to Hux that Ben had swung as far into joy as he had into despair, and the rebound was inevitable. In his nightmares he saw Ben as he had looked after what Hux could not speak of even to Millicent as his suicide attempt; his chest riddled with burns and bruising, his skin pale and shiny with sweat, his eyes gone dark with animal terror. Hux dreaded above all else seeing Ben returned to that state, or worse.

Hux was also aware that he was beginning to miss his work. Aboard his ship, he was the first awake and the last to bed, living off of caf and stim packs, able to do the job of every officer and engineer in his staff better than they could themselves. He would have done everything himself if it were possible, and because it was not, had hand-picked each of his officers in an effort to approach what he felt was the _Finalizer’s_ optimal functioning. He longed for the camaraderie of his ship now. Truly, Dopheld Mitaka and his funny little rat-droid were a sight for sore eyes. He was glad, too, that Ben seemed to have taken a liking to the man. Hux had attempted to kindle a friendship with vacationing officers of other First Order ships when he and Ben had visited the canal settlement, but it had led to a sudden attack of depression in Ben, quite out of proportion to the cause -- a late game of lunar croquet with a group of bachelors.

Just as a hungry man eagerly accepts what is given him hoping to find nourishment in it, Hux unconsciously clutched first at books and then at pictures to fill the sixteen hours a day now free and unscheduled to him. He took to painting again, sometimes pushing pigments around with delicate flicks of a brush and sometimes layering them thick and cutting into them with a knife. He was mesmerized by how the individual colors melded together into patterns as singular as fingerprints or snowflakes. Hux concentrated on this study, and began to paint Ben’s portrait. Ben was a remarkable subject, both because of how intimately Hux knew his face and because that face was on its own quite remarkable. Singular, like a fingerprint. The portrait seemed to Hux, and to everyone who saw it, extremely successful.

  
  


The module they had leased, with its low ceilings and dimly-lit white passageways, did much by its very appearance to allow Hux the agreeable illusion that he was not an Order officer on leave and bored out of his mind, but a bohemian moon-man who had renounced his planet in pursuit of the arts.

“Here we live, and we know nothing of what’s going on anywhere but between ourselves,” Hux said to Mitaka upon his first visit to the module after Hux and Ben were settled.

“Then you fit right in,” Mitaka said warmly. “There’s some strange folk here, that’s for sure. Half of them didn’t migrate to the moon of their own volition, if my meaning is quite clear. There’s a man in this colony,” and here Mitaka leaned in and lowered his voice in a conspiratorial fashion, “that many years ago on Earth professed rather an extreme view on the Robot Question. Took the line that the evolution of the machine should be up to its owner alone.”

“Yes, well,” Ben said, gesturing proudly to his own beloved-companion, preparing to defend that position or at least argue its merits.

“But this man -- Mikhail Mihailov, if I remember -- took the idea to a bizarre conclusion. He published the opinion that robots are the equals of humans. That junkering a Class 3 is akin to murder!” Hux raised his eyebrows, and Mitaka went on, blushing at this last part, “It is even said that he fell in love with his wife’s Class 3, and married it. Even if not, he found it necessary to come to this charming lunar colony.”

Mitaka settled happily into a chair beside them in the atelier, pleased at his own skills as a raconteur, while Ben sat quiet, absently stroking Kylo Ren’s hand as the droid reached to replenish Ben’s ink well. Were Mihailov’s views so wrong? Was not Ben’s own beloved-companion twice the person...twice the whatever you might call it...than most people Ben had known?

“Come here, Mitaka, I’ve got another easel set up for you.” said Hux.

“Oh, thank you! What are you painting today, sir?”

Hux reddened, “The sea, the way it looks in Arduinna. It’s only from memory you see, so it’s not very good.”

Mitaka disagreed vehemently, although he’d never seen Arduinna. “What should I paint? I have no ideas. Digging renders me dull.”

Hux laughed, “Paint us a better portrait of Ben,” he suggested, rousing Ben from his reflection.

“Why mine? Have him do yours to match. I don’t want another portrait after the one you’ve made.”

Mitaka was flustered at the idea of painting his commander. Suppose it was unsatisfactory! Or worse, what if the dregs of his own affection shone through and embarrassed the both of them? He was also struck, looking at Ben, by the way the subtle nimbus of luminescence emitted from Kylo Ren played across Ben’s angular features. “Ben’s portrait it is, so long as you promise you won’t demote me if you like it better than yours.”

“If I like it better than mine, I’ll promote you,” said Hux, perching a pair of 1/bifocals on his nose as he turned back to his own canvas.

Mitaka came frequently to spend time with Hux and Ben, most often in their atelier, and most often painting. Sometimes he did so even when Hux wasn’t, so consumed was he in the work. From the fifth sitting the portrait impressed everyone, especially Hux. Not only was it an exact resemblance, it seemed to Hux that Mitaka had discovered and highlighted Ben’s beauty of character as well.

“I’d have thought one needs to have known him and loved him as I have to see this,” Hux said to Millicent one night after Mitaka had left, gazing at the painting in progress. “It shows his soul.” Millicent rumbled softly in agreement. To Ben, what was remarkable about the portrait was Mitaka’s decision to include Kylo Ren and the red light he emitted. This decision was not traditional in portraiture, but to Ben it seemed entirely fitting and appropriate.

  
  


In the sixth sitting Hux sat up abruptly after checking his comms unit and informed the room that the Republic had just enacted a new project which included rounding up all Class 3 robots. They were all being gathered, it seemed, for some sort of mandatory circuitry adjustment. “Bizarre,” Hux murmured after reading the comm aloud.

“Very!” Mitaka agreed, and then passed on to other subjects, going on nervously about a funny little moonie he had lost in the pit earlier today, and the various difficulties in Extractor maintenance. But his brush had stilled.

Ben as well was deeply struck by this information, and he knew immediately who was behind this new “Republic” program. He dared not say it, as it would breach the polite political silence Mitaka had graced them with, but he whispered to Kylo Ren, “Might it be?” and Kylo flashed his eye bank in agreement. _It must be Chancellor Snoke. In my departure, my immersion in this freedom, my fellow Russians have suffered, and their beloved-companions too_. And his heart was hurt by feelings of guilt and frustration.

Mitaka finished his latest story and, as if remembering himself, went back to work. Hours later he sat back and tilted his head at his canvas. “Sir,” he said, and his voice was timid. Hux leaned over to look, and then exclaimed.

“Look at this! Here I’ve been struggling along and not doing anything, and you’ve done _this?_ Ben, you need to see it. It’s wonderful, Dopheld, simply wonderful.”

Usually Mitaka would have flushed crimson under the praise, but now he was pale and reserved, stroking the metal rodent on his shoulder with one hand as he looked at the wall, in the vague direction of Earth.

“I suppose I owe you that promotion,” Hux laughed. “Look at this technique.”

“General, sir,” he said. “Tell me, this project...they intend to gather up all the Class 3s for adjustments? It’s strange...I mean, you did say it was strange, didn’t you? What is the purpose? To what end?”

“Oh,” Hux said, enthusiasm dampened. In his pleasure at seeing the finished portrait he’d nearly forgotten the ominous communique. “It said nothing more. Only that we must trust in our leader. It said that, typed right at the bottom.”

Mitaka stood, still holding his brush, and took two steps toward the entryway. “Of course,” he said, “I suppose we must do that. That I suppose we must do.”

A long stillness filled the atelier. Hux looked at Ben with concern evident on his face. Ben stood with his hand clasped gently in Kylo Ren’s, and met Hux’s gaze. They had a conversation of sorts between them with no words, and were absorbed in it. The airlock had already swung shut with a decisive clank before either of them realized that Mitaka had exited -- and had not taken with him his helmet. Hux ran after him, donning his own helmet, and watched with wide eyes as his Lieutenant walked in his boots across the dusty lunar landscape, his gait showing no sign of the desperate constriction his lungs must be under. Mitaka stopped, reached up to his shoulder and sent his beloved-companion into involuntary Cease, and then lay down heavily and ran out of breath.

After the strange death of Mitaka, Ben and Hux’s rented module suddenly seemed so obtrusively bleak they could not stand it. There was too much dim white everywhere, and even outside the module the lunar landscape was rendered in black and pale gray. The distant blue of the Earth called them. They resolved to return to Russia, to Arkanis. Hux and Ben soon were climbing into a shuttle and hurtling back to the planet from whence they’d come.

  
  


Finn, married, was happy in ways he had not expected to be. At every step he found new, unexpected surprises of happiness. He was happy even though on entering upon family life he saw at every step that it was utterly different from what he had imagined. He was reminded of his experience in the stormtrooper service; jet-pack training where, after admiring the smooth, happy course of his fellow troopers, he was given his own opportunity. He saw then that it was not at all soaring smoothly; that he had to think, not for an instant forgetting his surroundings, that there was atmospheric pressure around him, and that he must endeavor to steer, and that his unaccustomed hands would be sore. It was only the look that was easy. Doing it, although delightful, was very difficult, and could be fatal.

As a bachelor, Finn had avoided high society and not made a great deal of married friends, and so his only reference for marriage was that of Han and Leia. He looked at their petty cares and squabbles, and he had thought them born of that same society he eschewed, and which Rey was no part of either, and he believed that there would be nothing of that sort in his own marriage. In fact, after he and Rey added Poe to their relationship, Finn was convinced that their home life must be unlike the life of others in everything. And all of a sudden, instead of their life being made on some individual pattern, he found it made completely of the pettiest details. He had once pictured his future domestic life as the happiest enjoyment of love unhindered by worldly cares.

This idea had been squashed immediately by the arrangement of their move to Arduinna, which his poetic, exquisite Rey desired more than anything else after the horror of their wedding. She set to work immediately, researching and deciding upon the home they would lease, ordering Class 1s for it, and so on. And through her own preoccupation with these cares and anxieties, they jarred upon Finn several times. Rey was cross with him when he had no opinion on this matter or that one, at times yelling at him to help her choose, but she was equally cross when he made a choice she disagreed with. Loving her as he did, he went on trying and making missteps at every turn.

He admired the way in which she arranged the furniture they’d brought from Moscow within their Arduin house -- walls and floor of real stone, as was the custom in the old north -- the way she arranged and rearranged their room, placing things first on one shelf and then another, and created a Cease nook for the cooking droid Leia and Han had gifted them with.

For all three of them there was a great sense of change, but most of all for Rey. She was for the first time living separately from, if nearby, her father, and the entire schedule of her home and life was hers. She could request nothing but her favorite dishes for dinner, if she wanted. She could take Porg out on the bicycle she’d ordered, riding him around in the basket at any hour she pleased along the old dirt roads surrounding Arduinna. She often did bike up the terraformed coast in her poncho, on days where the rain was light, weaving her bicycle through the waving yellow grasses and watching the gray swells break against the rocks.

The married life of Rey and Finn and Poe in Arduinna was largely serene, a time of respite, even with the presence of Kuruk Ren in their guest room. Each of them felt, in a strange sense, that the others were themself, and as a result any spats between them took on that quality. They felt as a man would feel if he were struck on the back of the head and turned, ready to exact revenge, only to find that it was himself who had struck him, and there was nothing to do now but soothe the bump.

The only large quarrel which occured in their time north was when Rey accompanied her father to check on one of his old friends, Wedge, whom neither of them had heard from in some time. Upon reaching his farmhouse, they found him dead. They did not find the koschei responsible, but surely it must have been a koschei of some sort. Wedge’s remains were nearly skeletal, and rested in a thick pool of ochre-yellow goo.

Rey and Luke spent an hour recreating the struggle, tracing out the indents in the dirt. For a time they heard a faint ticking that seemed almost to come from the soil, but it faded before they could locate it. Ultimately they determined that the mechanical monster had to have been larger by a third than anything ever reported, which left them with even more questions. Creating and releasing a koschei that large in secret would be nearly impossible. Were the death machines, in fact, engineered to _grow?_ And how?

When Rey had returned home and recounted her findings to her husbands, they had both been at once furious with her for placing herself in danger, although it had been done entirely by accident and she was more than capable of handling herself, she insisted. This exact scene of discord was interrupted by the chime of the 1/sonnette indicating they had a visitor. Poe opened the door to find two First Order officers on their steps.

“Good afternoon,” said one of them, her voice conveying respect and self-conscious apology for interrupting said afternoon. The man behind her wore his hat at a slightly insouciant angle on his blond head, his arms crossed, and a smile frozen on his face. His careful gaze was locked on Porg and BB8.

“We are representatives of the Republic’s Ministry of Robotics,” continued the woman, speaking in a polished and rushed way, as if from prepared text. “We have come today to collect this household’s Class 3 companion robots, in compliance with the Chancellor’s order for compulsory circuitry adjustment.” here her voice gained more life, “This household was granted an extension in Moscow in respect of your nuptials. And may we add our congratulations, on behalf of the Republic and the First Order, on that blessed event.”

The other soldier uncrossed his arms and pointed toward their droids, speaking curtly, “These are the machines to be taken, yes?”

BB8 squealed and rolled to Poe’s side, and Poe curled around him protectively. “No,” he said. “They can’t go.”

Finn drew in a breath, aware more than his partners were that disrespecting an officer’s authority could get ugly. Gazing upon his husband with his arms around BB8, he was struck by the evident distress in both, and even though he himself had no Class 3, he knew Poe was right.

“Excuse my husband,” Rey said, fixing the officers with her best charming smile, “Naturally we will comply with the ruling of the Republic. We are all distressed here today, for I have just returned from observing the corpse of a local landowner and friend, murdered by koshei. Now that you are here, would you do us the service, in your official capacity, of riding out and investigating?”

Speaking rapidly, directing her words to the first soldier, the one who seemed to Rey to have the friendlier nature, Rey explained what she and her father had seen on Wedge’s farm: his skeleton stripped of flesh, the signs of struggle, the puddle of strange goo. She told them too, of her encounters with koschei in Moscow, and how she felt the frequency of attacks was surely increasing, and how her household felt that they could not afford the loss of their protective Class 3s out here in the country where there were no 77s and Peacekeepers patrolling. “Could you, as long as your business has brought you to this province, do something about these monsters?”

But the soldier only scratched the coiled hair at her temple and squinted, seemingly uninterested. “That is indeed a most alarming tale,” she said. “But it does not pertain to our business here. We are on strict orders from Chancellor Snoke.”

Rey was inwardly cursing the single-mindedness of toy soldiers when the other one, who had been standing mute, seeming not to pay attention at all, reached out and held up an open palm. “By chance,” he said, “Did you hear a sound...like a sort of ticking?” Rey nodded her assent, at which the soldier sighed and grabbed the shoulder of his partner, turning her around to speak to her in a whisper. He turned back and said in a casual tone, “We shall return later, and complete our previously announced business here.” His eyes bored into Poe’s as he added, “We have no desire to perform our commission by force.” They turned on their black-booted heels and left, Rey rushing to shut the door behind them and sagging against it, at last letting her fear show on her face.

Poe burst into tears. “I can’t bear for them to take him!” He said, clutching BB’s form.

“Me either, dear,” Finn told him, coming to his side and rubbing reassuring circles on his back.

“What will they do with them? I mean _really_ do?”

“I don’t know,” said Rey.

“Madame,” interjected Porg anxiously in his high chirping voice, “Perhaps we could be hidden?” BB8 burbled, echoing the sentiment.

“Yes, yes of course,” Finn said, pointing at the little machines. “They’re right.”

“We need to act fast.” Rey said, nodding sharply at him. Immediately there commenced in the Skywalker household a frenzy of activity, humans and robots moving alike. What to do? Where to go?

“Father’s home is our best bet,” Rey said. “He owns the land there, there’s no danger of someone else inspecting it or him losing it.”

“We’ll need to carry them there in Cease,” said Finn. “And cover them. There may be other toy soldiers on the roads.”

“I’ll go alone, a girl visiting her father is perfectly reasonable. We’d be more suspicious moving as a group. They’d suspect us of fleeing.”

“Absolutely not!” Poe cried. And this was a return to their earlier argument. “It’s too dangerous, you think if you got caught we could stand living on, knowing you were persecuted as a Separatist?! _They’ll execute you!_ ”

“You’re being stupid, we need to move _now_. Finn, get the trunk from the hall, the one we brought the cook here in. I’ll carry BB in it. Pile curtains on top of him, and we’ll put cloaks over the whole thing. I’ll put the little trailer on my bike, and I have a few baskets to take to father anyway…if anyone stops me and sees baskets of vegetables and a pile of Jedi cloaks they won’t bother to search it for tech. Porg will ride in the basket, I’ll wrap him up and put carrots in the bundle.”

“You don’t even listen to me!” Poe yelled at her, “This is awful, what are we? Your servants?”

“Why did you marry, then? If you regret it?” Rey hissed at him. “You could have stayed free.”

Poe began to speak, trying to find the words to dissuade his wife from this perilous task, but she would not heed him, bustling about the path she had set for herself, gathering up the items she needed. At last he grabbed hold of her face in his hands and said simply, “Rey!” and began to cry again, and they were reconciled. Rey threw her arms around him.

“There’s no other way. I’m trying to save us, and I’ve got to go alone.”

Abruptly the doorbell rang again, and all eyes, natural and mechanical, turned to it in horror.

“Take them out the back,” Rey beseeched Poe, and he did at once.

Finn approached the door and opened it with shaking hands, expecting somehow to be met with a blaster, convinced in his terror that the Order knew of their treasonous plan as soon as it had been formulated. Instead he was met with a thin, brown man in a dirty woolen cloak, with a good-natured but timid expression on his pock-marked face.

“Excuse me,” he said, and he nearly trembled himself, seeming at any moment ready to flee. “I have been searching, asking...I am Ushar Nikoladyich, Ren is my husband...I was told he is here. Please….”

Rey caught sight of the man, recognizing him instantly from the orbiter. “Let him in!” Finn stepped aside and Ushar entered, falling to his knees in front of Rey and thanking her with raised hands clasped in front of him. “We met on the orbiter, though we were not acquainted. He still calls for you,” Rey said, “We didn’t know...how could we have known? I’m so sorry, but he’s much worse off. He’s dying. Come, I’ll show you to the guest room.”

Ushar followed, questioning Rey in his timid voice. “How worse? In what way?”

“He can’t get up. He writhes, and there is something happening with his skin... _it moves_. Come, come on.”

Finn followed them, hanging back so as not to crowd the guest room as it was opened. The stone of the walls nearest the bed was filthy with droplets of spittle from Kuruk’s wracking cough. He lay, covered with a quilt. One arm rested above the quilt, and the hand like a huge knobby white sea-creature, the wrist as thick as a rake-handle, were attached inconceivably to the thin, long bone of the arm. Kuruk’s head lay sideways on his pillow, and gave them scant looks wet with sweat from his transparent-looking forehead. Karnak was absent, having been collected with the Organas’ droids in Moscow, but Kuruk was so far gone that he hadn’t seemed to miss his beloved-companion.

As Ushar approached the bed, any doubt that this ghoulish figure was Kuruk Ren became impossible. In spite of the terrible changes that had overcome him, those dull eyes raised up, eager, and that dry fever-white mouth twitched under his sticky mustache, and Ushar knew the terrible truth that this death-like creature was his living husband. When Ushar took him by his emaciated hand, Kuruk smiled. He was lucid now.

“You did not expect to find me like this,” Kuruk articulated with effort.

“No...and yes,” Ushar said sadly.

A great swell of flesh bubbled up in Kuruk’s midsection beneath the quilt, as though his body was a balloon and air had been temporarily forced into one part. He cringed and groaned. Ushar looked away, blanching.

“How was it you didn’t let me know before you were suffering like this? How is it you left?”

Kuruk could not answer; again the flesh of his torso bubbled grotesquely, and again he gritted his teeth in evident agony. Containing her revulsion enough to speak, Rey said, “I must go and visit my father now. Finn will stay here with you, and Poe will be back shortly.” She took her leave, and Ushar hardly seemed to notice.

Rey rode to her father’s house and met with two different pairs of Order officers on the roads, separate from the pair that had called on her home, though neither pair deigned to search her and simply sent her on her way. She was elated to find Luke still in possession of R2, and together they moved old Jedi texts out of the temple in his backyard, fashioned out of a massive hollowed tree. They dug into the dirt floor together, careful of the large winding roots, and laid their Ceased droids wrapped in cloaks into the earth. Once they were covered and the texts returned to their storage, Rey instructed Luke that he would likely be visited by toy soldiers and that he should tell them his Class 3 was already collected. It would take them some time to notice that none of their roving units had recorded Class 3s from these households after all. Enough time to decide their next move.

  
  


As the hours and then the days passed without the soothful presence of their Class 3s, life within Rey’s household became unbearable. There were no sounds but the sounds of the dying man, and his odor permeated the stone house.

Ushar hardly left his side, which Rey felt was beyond commendable, as Kuruk’s condition would turn anyone’s stomach no matter the strength of their heart. She herself sometimes endeavored to analyse the ways in which she might make him more comfortable, and it overwhelmed her to consider how his body was lying under his quilt, how his emaciated legs and spine curled up as he writhed in pain, how those long waves of undulating flesh appeared and disappeared in his midsection as this unspeakable illness ate him alive. At times she felt in her heart that it was cruel to do anything to prolong his life, though she dared not speak this aloud to anyone. When Rey called on her charge, she was continually, on various pretexts, finding reasons to leave the room, to go outside and gulp in the fresh and rain-scented air, because she was unable to remain in the sickroom. It was agony.

Ushar acted quite differently. On seeing the roiling flesh of the sick man, he pitied him. And pity in Ushar’s heart was without all the feelings of horror and loathing it aroused in Rey, but a desire to act, to find out Kuruk’s pains and remedy them. And since Ushar had not the slightest doubt that it was his duty to help his husband, he had no doubt either that such a thing was possible, and immediately set to work. Those same details of his condition which overwhelmed Rey were what engaged Ushar’s attention. Ushar conferred with the medical droid, and then in the absence of household cleaning droids, set Finn to sweeping and dusting the room, and scrubbed every surface himself. He ordered something brought out of the sickroom and something else brought in, freshened Kuruk’s sheets and adjusted the positioning of his pillows. Upon the changing of his linens, it was apparent that his jutting ribs and spine, and his huge, prominent shoulder blades, were riddled with a constellation of gray and blackish sores.

The sick man, though he seemed indifferent to these changes and indeed was, as nothing could ease his suffering, seemed more alive than he had in months now that Ushar had found him. “I’m much better,” he rasped even as he worsened every hour. “With you I would have gotten well long ago. Forgive this fool, please.” He grasped his husband’s hand and pulled it as if he would kiss it, and then decided against such contact and simply stroked it.

  
  


The next day, Luke arrived at Ushar’s request to give Kuruk his last rites, as the many seasons of Ushar’s life -- one of them a sex worker, one of them a factory man applying oil to the joints of cigarette-making droids, and one spent in a house of the dying -- told him that this last burst of energy in Kuruk signified his imminent end.

“They get a little better, just before,” he had told Rey in a hushed voice.

Luke stood in the room, in his white tunic and brown robe, holding up a weathered book and reading from it in a gentle voice.

Rey had sent a communique to Hux through her watch, even more grateful now that she’d had the foresight to give such a gift. Ben had responded through Hux’s device, and she’d talked him out of rushing north, writing to him that there was no time, and that it would be better to speak to Kuruk through the watch while he still lived than to simply visit his body. She was somewhat stunned to learn that the both of them were back, as it meant they’d cut their time on the moon short, but there was no time to question them. Rey held her watch up to Kuruk, letting him rasp half-formed thoughts to Ben over an audio link.

It was agonizing to behold the supplicating, hopeful eyes of the dying man as they roved over the room blearily, to see his skeletal form, wasted and covered in wounds, his prominent shoulder bones and hollow, gasping chest. He did seem better, though not by much. He didn’t cough once while Luke spoke, but as soon as the ceremony was finished he was wracked by a particularly violent bout of it, along with the return of the sickening flesh-bulging phenomenon, which made him rock back and forth and bend his back in pain. He tried to push himself up on his elbows, and cried out.

“Lay back,” Ushar pleaded, “It will be easier on you.”

“I’ll be on my back soon enough,” Kuruk groaned, “When I’m dead.”

“What manner of death is this,” murmured Rey into Finn’s shoulder, watching from the corner of her eyes as the man’s stomach bulged and puckered, twitching grotesquely.

Ushar Nikoladyich’s prediction that this was the last day came true. Toward the night Ushar was not able to lift his hands, and could only gaze before him with an intensely concentrated expression of terror in his eyes. At the exact moment that the sun sank below the horizon, Kuruk Ren buckled violently, his limbs thrashing, his body contorting up and back, shaking. Every sore on his body pulsed, and his eyes rolled back in his head, and then each little sore, hideously gray or black depending on its depth in his skin, began to burst, leaking cobalt bile. His stomach bulged forward to an obscene degree. He moaned terribly.

At that moment the door to the already crowded sickroom burst open and the toy soldiers from before entered. “We are representatives of the Republic’s Ministry of Robotics -- _dear GOD!_ ”

For while the soldier had been speaking, Kuruk Ren sat bolt upright in bed and his skin tore clean from his body, his flesh falling to the floor by the bed like paper. All present, including the First Order officers, stood frozen as Kuruk issued his last gurgling scream, his face ghost-white above the red and heaving waste of his torso, and then his head lolled backward at a terrible angle. The remains of his body were shaken free, a useless husk: shaken free by a hunched and slavering inhuman being. It flexed, and stood on the bed, hunched in the room, wiping its green-gray face free of gore with its taloned hands. It had some dozens of eyes, clustered around a jagged reptilian snout. Its tail thrashed, breaking the bed frame, and it reached out with it’s four arms, grabbing for the humans crowded around it.

Finn cried out and threw himself in front of Rey. Luke drew back, pulling his lightsaber from his belt. Before he ignited it, the beast had grabbed Ushar in one arm, snapping his spine like a twig, and taken hold of one of the toy soldiers, the blond man, in another. The man screamed. “ _Help! Help me!_ ” But the creature issued a shrieking cry and snapped its jaws closed around his head like a steel trap, crushing his skull and splattering its contents across every surface. Luke ignited his saber, casting the room in its green glow, and the monster reared back with the officer’s body dangling from its mouth, smashed its tree trunk of a tail against the wall, and lunged for the door. It crushed the remaining soldier beneath its limbs as it fled the house and disappeared into the dark night of the northern country, leaving them to deal with this new mystery.

The grisly death of Kuruk Ren was the result of having somehow become a hatching ground for some sort of creature. Within the week there were reports from all distant reaches of Russia of similar hatchings, and the Republic confirmed through a video message from Chancellor Snoke himself that these creatures were alien in origin. He referred to them, with a cruel half-smile, in the fashion that the executed stargazers had referred to their benevolent light-beings: as Russia’s Honored Guests.

Thus the first aliens to initiate contact with humans rather than run from Earth were confirmed to have done so as an act of open war.

  
  


When they had landed upon terra firma after journeying back from the moon, Hux and Ben stayed two nights with their Class 3s at a Moscow hotel before moving on to Arkanis. Had Ben kept up a correspondence with his parents it would have been possible to see them, but now he felt that he had no right to call on them, and didn’t attempt it.

 _If the world disapproves I don’t care,_ thought Ben, _but if my parents want to be on family terms with me like Rey is, they will have to be on the same terms with my husband_.

On that day of their arrival, they dined out, and found themselves the subject of many shocked stares. Acquaintances of Hux’s greeted them at their table, and here planetside where judgement had thickened in the same proportion as gravity, some of them visibly blanched, thinning their lips when Hux introduced his husband, Ben Solo. Hux cut his conversations short with these people, and Ben was glad for it. The last person to approach their table that night was Admiral Pryde, and Ben could tell by his husband’s demeanor that Hux had no affection for the man.

“Back on the planet, then,” said Pryde, fixing Hux with a cold blue stare that was out of place in his smiling face. “And your charming Millicent has been returned to you! How marvelous for you! You are among the deserving, then?” At Hux’s blank look, Pryde went on, “The Chancellor told me personally that Class 3s are only to be returned to the deserving, but I see now that yours has yet to be gathered up. Yes, he did say they would not be returned in the same form, but here she is, lovely as ever!” A beat passed where it seemed that perhaps Hux would ignore Pryde entirely, and then Hux thawed. To the implied question, he had no answer. He did not know when Snoke would take Millicent from him as all of Russia’s Class 3s had been taken. So, he addressed the first statement.

“Yes, we’ve just returned from a honeymoon of sorts, although late.”

Pryde’s face contorted in overplayed surprise, because of course the accomplished young General Hux’s shameful marriage was the talk of the Order. Pryde stuck his hand out for Ben to shake, and Ben did so after a glance at Hux. “Ben,” Ben said simply, unsure how much detail Hux wanted Pryde to have. It was likely the man knew all and was simply looking for confirmation.

Pryde, turning back to Hux, said, “It’s a shame that taking the name of your partner went out of style in the last century. It could have benefitted you some,” and then his eyes widened, as though he had just lit on a genius idea, “Ah! But of course there’s still time to remedy that. As of this very morning all Republic documentation of domestic affairs was voided by Chancellor Snoke, and everyone must apply again. If you indeed have anything you would like to _change_.”

“ _What?_ ” Hux asked sharply.

“Oh yes!” said Pryde. “First the Class 3s, and now people’s marriages and adoptions and so forth. It’s like a fresh start, really. We were living in filthy streets and overnight, a fresh snowfall. Truly our new Chancellor is a bold and principled man. Well, I must be off. I trust I’ll be seeing you, General Hux.”

Left alone again, Hux and Ben stared at each other in mute horror, each thinking the same things: that a new marriage license would never be granted by Chancellor Snoke, and that once their Class 3s were taken they would never be returned. Hux called the serving droid over and paid their bill, and they left with their dinner unfinished, feeling like hunted men on their walk back to the hotel. The path took them near the street where the Organas apartment lay, and though Ben didn’t slow his pace, he craned his neck to keep sight of that street corner as long as he could.

Back in their room, they undressed for bed immediately, both exhausted from their journey and now from this devastating news. Hux cued a local news holo-feed up on the room’s 1/tele, but muted it as though he couldn’t face both image and sound. Endless scenes of carnage played, the tagline scrolling by reading what was known of the Honored Guests who now roamed Russia in packs. “We’ll be safer in the provinces,” he said at last.

Ben sat up from where he had lain in bed, scooting forward to pull Hux into his arms. “What do you mean?”

“It’s good we planned to return to Arkanis after tomorrow. We’ll be safer there, the four of us.”

“You don’t intend to give them up before we go?” Ben asked. He’d spent the whole journey back to Earth trying in vain to come to terms with his separation from his beloved Kylo Ren, and his mind was shocked blank at the thought that it was not to be so.

“I intend,” said Hux, “to hold on as long as we can.” And he brought Ben’s left hand to his mouth, kissing the back of his palm just below the gold of his wedding band.

The following night they had been invited to the Vox Fourteen theatre to see a sensational new opera, by Captain Phasma and _Korsunsky_ of all people. As they readied themselves in their room, Ben spoke each worry that crossed his mind aloud. “Is it becoming for you to be seen with both me and Korsunsky? He’s worked with my mother for years. Why did he even invite us?”

“Perhaps he has no friends. Besides, you are Korsunsky’s guest and I am Phasma’s, so there’s nothing untoward about it.”

“Why are we going?”

“Why not?”

“Should we leave the Class 3s here? Won’t it be worse to flaunt them?”

“No, I’d rather keep them with us, I think. Phasma’s gotten us a box, we won’t be crowded in a row.” Hux buttoned up his shirt, a light blue silk one he’d acquired on the moon, and pulled on his navy suit jacket. Millicent enveloped him in a gentle pearl-white glow that rendered him, in Ben’s opinion, unfairly beautiful.

“I mean are we really doing this? Going to the theatre?” Ben asked, trying not to look at Hux, as it would demolish his resolve.

“Why are you so alarmed?” Hux said, exasperated. “Why shouldn’t we go? You want to hide?”

“Yes!” Ben nearly yelled. “I’d rather hide than see you hurt on my account.”

“Ben,” Hux said curtly, “Do I regret what we’ve done? No, _no!_ If I were to do it all again from the beginning, I’d do it the same. I love you, and I don’t care for anything else. Look at me.”

Ben did at last. He looked at him, and saw all the beauty of his face, as radiant as the day Ben had first seen him, the day that poor soul had died on the tracks. Ben saw all the same beauty in his husband that had drawn him to him, and was angry. He almost hated him. He was also unable to properly express himself, which deepened his aggravation. What he meant to say was, _Looking like this, looking as if you’ve never been better, with that Class 3 glow on you, with ME by your side, is not merely acknowledging your tremulous position in the Order, it is flinging down a challenge to society. And I will not have you cut yourself off from it for me, when I am nothing and you are something great_. What Ben Solo could not yet understand was that such concerns simply did not matter for the two of them anymore. After that night at the Vox Fourteen, a night that would be long remembered and long mourned by the Russian people, he would understand better.

When they arrived at the palatial Vox Fourteen it was half past eight and the performance was in full swing. Phasma was one to insist that she never arrive at the start of an opera; it was unfashionable. And for a First Order Captain, she was incredibly fashionable. She met them on the stairs and swept Hux around in a circle before setting him down, something she did with ease -- she stood a full inch taller than Ben and was equally sturdy -- and at every off-duty opportunity. She leaned down for Hux to give her a kiss on the cheek, and then Ben was surprised that she turned and embraced him just as warmly, throwing her arms wide for a hug and leaning in for a kiss from him as well. She was dressed in a sparkling silver gown which wrapped loosely around her frame, the folds of fabric catching the light each time she moved, and had her short blonde hair swept back from her face. Korsunsky hung back, looking worse for wear with new lines in his face, but nevertheless immaculately groomed and dressed in his black trousers and silver jacket to match Phasma. He greeted Ben with a clap on his shoulder and then gave Hux a timid, almost childlike little wave, seeming pitifully charmed when Hux offered him a handshake.

“Come, friends,” Korsunsky said, “We’ll take our seats at the intermission.”

The 1/box-keeper recognized Phasma and Hux and addressed them by their titles as the door slid open for them to enter their box. They took their seats, Phasma and Korsunsky framing Ben and Hux, and Phasma at once set to updating Hux on all the most recent Order gossip he had missed out on, the two of them talking excitedly in hushed whispers, a mean glint in both their eyes. Ben was uninterested in talking to Korsunsky, who seemed desperate for interaction but also, mercifully shy. Something had taken the wind out of him even more after the junkering of his Class 3, it seemed.

The last wavering note of the first act fell away into silence and then thundering applause. The singer, bowing and smiling, with her bare shoulders flashing with diamonds, was gathering up the bouquets that were flying awkwardly over the footlights. The applause waned, replaced by the low and thunderous sounds of an auditorium of people moving and stretching.

Korsunsky shifted beside him, and Ben realized that there was something going on in the next box, to their right. In that box had been sitting the Sebatynes, old friends of Leia Organa. Ben knew them, and knew their thoughts on the First Order. Madame Eelysa, a thin woman with brown skin and angular features, was standing up in the box, shaking her braided head vigorously at her wife Saba. Her face was angry and she was talking excitedly. Saba, a fat, bald, and bronzed woman, was holding out her wife’s coat, attempting to soothe Eelysa, and continually peering round to Ben’s box, looking between him and Hux.

When Eelysa at last went out, Saba lingered a long while, trying to catch Ben’s eye, obviously anxious to bow to him. Ben at first avoided noticing her, staring straight ahead, but it quickly became apparent that Saba would stand and stare at him the whole night if she must. Cursing her stubbornness, Ben excused himself and exited his box, seeing Saba do the same.

“Oh, I’ll accompany you!” said Korsunsky, and Ben didn’t bother to disagree.

Ben and Korsunsky met Saba in the hall just outside their boxes, and she bowed deeply to them, which they returned.

“Korsunsky, this is Saba Sebatyne,” Ben said, and then seeing that Eelysa waited down the hall, resolutely refusing to address him, he didn’t try and introduce her.

“Pleased to make your acquaintance, young man,” Saba said to Korsunsky, “I’ve seen you at Leia’s events before.”

“Yes! It’s an honor, Madame Sebatyne,” Korsunsky said with a smile.

She turned back to Ben, not bothering with any further pretense. “It’s true, then? I’d told Eelysa it couldn’t be.”

“It’s true,” Ben told her flatly.

Saba’s broad face was pained. “You’re breaking your mother’s heart, child. I was there when you were born, when Calrissian said of you ‘his defiance will shake the stars.’ Now you turn your back on the Republic, on democracy itself. I see _you_ still have your android. As does _he_.” She nodded at Kylo Ren, standing silently behind Ben. And of course Millicent’s glow had been unmistakeable in their box.

“I have no stake in politics,” Ben told her, and her eyes darkened further.

“Ha!” Saba spat at him. “Taking no sides, then? Distant from it all. Is that what you think of yourself? There’s no such thing, young Solo.” Her eyes narrowed then, and she stared imperiously up at him. “Do you think _he_ has taken a side? The _General?_ I’d say he has. They’re all saying you’ve turned. Seeing you now, I wish you had. It’d be better for you, I think, in the end. Farewell.” With that, Saba took her leave of them, joining Eelysa and exiting with her. Eelysa cast one nasty look back at them before the couple were gone.

Before Korsunsky could say something to dispel the dark mood that hung over them, they were approached anew by a group of three First Order officers. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” one of them said. “But I see that your Class 3 device has been strangely overlooked in the adjustment protocol. As it happens, we can rectify that situation right away.”

Kylo Ren flexed his metal fists and hissed out a burst of static. Ben’s hand twitched toward the saber, which he had taken to wearing on his belt.

“Oh, that won’t do,” said another officer, and they drew their blasters, training them on Ben and Korsunsky.

“Heavens!” exclaimed Korsunsky, holding up his hands. “Really! You draw weapons here? In this place of entertainment?”

The officers’ response was a volley of blaster fire. Korsunsky and Ben ducked as one, and Kylo Ren tore the durasteel door to their box clean off, using it to shield them. The plasma bolts ricocheted off it and around the hall, one of them catching the officer to the far left in his jugular. The absence of the door opened them up the sounds coming from inside the theatre -- there was a cacophony of panicked screams and laser fire, some of it coming from right inside. In their box.

“ _Hux!_ ” Ben yelled, and got no response.

“Stand down, robot!” one of the officers said, and Kylo Ren froze, obeying the Iron Laws and dropping the heavy door. The muzzles of the officers’ blasters glowed red, ready to fire another volley of deadly bolts.

Just then, a woman appeared as if from thin air. She wore a yellow jumpsuit and had her black hair pulled back, and there was a determined look in her dark eyes. She brought up her own blaster and put a bolt in each officer’s head before they could react to her appearance. “Ben Solo,” she said, “You must leave this place!” and then she ran off down the hall.

“Can’t argue with that,” said Korsunsky, and pulled Ben back into their box.

The inside of the theatre was open war. First Order officers did battle on every level with these strange yellow-or-orange-jumpsuited people, who seemed to wink in and out of existence. And in the midst of it all, both sides and everyone in between was set on by massive beasts with their clusters of ochre-yellow eyeballs and their razored lizard-mouths. Ben was relieved to see Phasma and Hux splattered red but alive.

“Are you hurt?”

“Not so badly as they,” Hux quipped, clutching Millicent to his chest. There were two bodies slumped over the railing of the box, broken like dolls, one with their head torn entirely off. Judging by her appearance, that had been the work of Phasma. But the other…

“How--” Ben began, and Hux interrupted.

“Ben, we must go. Run!”

As the battle raged on in the hallways, the aliens seemed to turn the tide against all of humanity, whether one was clothed in black or orange. Twitching, snarling, slavering, their massive reptilian heads bubbling with eyeballs, their snouts snapping through flesh and bone, their hands ending in slashing claws, their tails dragging against the floors with a horrible dry _wush_. The aliens poured in a great, fearsome horde into the Moscow Vox Fourteen, hundreds of them, yowling their loud high-pitched shrieks as they sped up and down the aisles.

As Ben and Hux rushed headlong for the exits, all around them was unspeakable carnage. Behind them, Korsunsky slipped on the spilled entrails of some unfortunate soul and went down, and would have been the next victim of the Honored Guest munching on that corpse if Kylo Ren had not scooped him up and carried him like a bride away from the monster. It shrieked at the lost opportunity for hot blood, and a pack of the beasts tore down the halls after their group, hot on their heels. Phasma had drawn her sidearm and used it to clear their path, shooting at anything and anyone that threatened to slow them down. Ben ignited his saber, cutting at every swathe of gray-green alien hide that drew close enough, spilling cobalt blood. Hux clutched Millie close, frequently letting out a stream of colorful curses as they ran, sorely missing his blaster.

Just as in all combat from the dawn of time, those with the least stake in it suffered the most grievously. Wives, husbands, singers...the old and the young, not one in ten made it out alive. First Order shot at Separatists -- for who else could they be? -- and civilians were shot, Separatists shot at First Order and civilians were shot, aliens slashed and tore at everyone and civilians were torn. Not one in ten escaped the scalding blow of the blaster or the ragged maw of the lizard beast, or the trampling boot of their fellow theatregoers, desperate for escape. By morning the floors of the Vox Fourteen were made up of more blood and viscera than durasteel, the aisles choked with shredded bodies. But Hux and Ben had long since made their escape, from the theatre and from Moscow.

By the time the first fingers of dawn crept over the windowsills of all Russia, Ben and Hux were huddled together on the Moscow-Groznyy grav-metro, their Class 3s seated safely beside them, well on their way to Arkanis Academy. They were fugitives now from this new society that was being forged by Hux’s own military. This was not a permanent solution, Hux knew. In time, these ideals which Chancellor Snoke had started in Moscow would spread even to the furthest provinces. And then there would be no choice, as resistance meant their destruction.

But for now, he had Ben, and they still had their beloved droids. Hux ran his fingers through Ben’s hair absently as Ben slept on his shoulder, his breath hot on Hux’s neck. They had argued briefly, upon returning to their room and packing feverishly. They had thrown things into their suitcases, each crumpled article of clothing then being picked up and folded correctly by Kylo Ren.

“I almost lost you!” Ben had shouted at him. “I told you we shouldn’t have gone!”

“Yes, of course, I distinctly remember you saying ‘No, we can’t go, there will be a catastrophic alien attack.’ Don’t be absurd!”

“I begged you that we shouldn’t go, I knew it would be unpleasant--”

“Unpleasant!” Hux had cried, throwing his next item so vehemently that Millicent chirped at him, alarmed. “Those men...the Separatists--”

“If that’s what they were.”

“What else, Ben?! And the Honored Guests... _unpleasant_ , I swear. It was hideous!”

“You think I don’t know that? I’ll never forget it!”

Hux scowled and turned again to his packing. “Well you must, now. Forget it all. There are more important things to occupy us now.”

“I hate your calm! You bring me to this state. If you loved me--”

“ _Ben!_ How does the question of my love come into this? Into _everything_ with you?”

“If you loved me as I love, if you were tortured as I am…!” Ben cried, looking at Hux with an expression of absolute terror that wounded Hux acutely.

Hux had bitten back his urge to reproach Ben, reproaching him only in his heart but not with words, and had gone to him and kissed him. Hux assured Ben of his love, though doing so shamed him strangely, made him feel as though he were doing Ben a disservice by playing into his extreme emotions, because he knew it was the only means of soothing him. And Ben drank in his words and kisses eagerly, and gradually became calmer. The next hour, completely reconciled, they had parted with their Class 3s for the country, and here they were now.

 _Here we are now,_ thought Hux, and tightened his grip on the back of Ben’s neck.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I pictured droid versions of the Kaminoans for the moonies. Poor Mitaka. Also *love* any opportunity to write Phasma, my glamorous large wife. And poor Korsunsky. And Wedge. /Everyone. How long do you think Ben and Hux can hold on?


	4. THE LORDS OF ARKANIS

One week after the massacre at the Vox Fourteen, Chancellor Snoke announced that the circuitry adjustment had been a failure. Class 3 companion robots, due to an inherent flaw in design, could not be brought properly up to date. And thus, the ancient class of beloved-companions entered its obsolescence.

In Moscow, two plumes of smoke emanated from the grating around the tower of the Senate, from the sub-basement where Russia’s Class 3 robots were being melted down into scrap. At the end of the broadcast, Snoke announced the dismissal of all Republic senators and ministers, to be replaced by Order loyalists. He signed off the transmission as Supreme Leader Andrew Snoke. On every level of the capital city, Senate Peacekeepers were forcibly detained by First Order officers, resulting in no few number of skirmishes and deaths between them.

Winter would soon end, but clenched one last choking grasp on the land, and all over Russia’s filthy city streets and country roads, there was a fresh snowfall to render the world in white.

  
  


Moscow’s foreboding plumes of smoke were not visible from Arduinna, but the changes they represented were felt there as much as anywhere. Rey and her family felt united now in common purpose. Having hidden their droids, they vowed never to submit their beloved-companions for “adjustment” -- now understood to be a permanent adjustment indeed -- no matter what should happen.

They were united in their opposition to Russia’s new government, and in their fear of the Honored Guests and these strange new koschei which attacked the north in droves, yet unseen except for the skeletons they left in their wake. For Rey and her husbands, though, all of this tension and looming despair only reaffirmed and heightened their love for each other.

They played host now, to Leia and Han and genial Korsunsky, arrived from Moscow after Leia’s dismissal from the Senate, and Rey was especially happy to be reunited with her Aunt and Uncle. The presence of Leia, the old Tsarevna, who had abdicated the throne now cruelly re-made, and who had submitted her own Class 3 for adjustment and now knew she had lost him for good, only made the household’s shared bond that much stronger.

Luke had quickly brought his sister and her husband in on the secret of their buried droids, and Leia was privately envious but twice-over happy for them, and supported them firmly in their defiance of Snoke, assuring them they had made the right choice.

In an effort to fortify their homes against alien invasion, Finn and Poe had been building a large fence around both their property and Luke’s. Rey had also taken it upon herself to wall up the old temple at Luke’s home, an extra precaution to protect the sacred texts within and the droids below, should the property be compromised. It was to this end, finishing this errand, that Rey took off on her bike the evening of Leia and Han’s arrival, accompanied at his insistence by Korsunsky, who rode shakily on Poe’s bike beside her.

She carried her saber and as she rode, she watched the scrub brush and hills sharply for any hint of an Honored Guest. It is exactly the man who most fears death from above who is most vulnerable to death from below. So it was with Rey Skywalker and Arkadyich Korsunsky as they rode past the squat little stone house of Luke Skywalker, their eyes trained on the horizon in case a pack of aliens would come leaping out at them.

For it was the ground beneath their wheels that tore open and spilled forth the horrific form of a koschei. The air was filled with an audible ticking, the exact sound that Rey had heard at the death-site of Wedge, and a gigantic worm-machine twisted up from the broken ground, spitting ochre-yellow ooze from its gaping maw, ringed with the shining needle-teeth characteristic of the death-machines.

The segmented monster writhed up, pouring out of the ground like a Grav emerging from its tunnel. With a quick roll Rey abandoned her bike and fell away to the side, going for her saber, which was dual-bladed and built into the handle of a staff, strapped to her back.

Rey Skywalker, breathing heavily, her blood pulsing in her veins, rose to her feet and ignited her lightsaber, casting the evening gloom and the roiling form of the koschei in blue. She sank into a warrior’s stance, poised to strike.

Korsunsky clambered free of the pit, crawling up the other side, eyes wide and mouth agape at the beast before them.

Curiously, however, the creature’s huge and hideous head paused and held steady with a crooked neck, twisting first this way and then that, as if searching for something. Rey thought she saw dim lights, dim red lights beneath the green-gray “skin” of the creature...the lights of sensors?

 _By the Force, it’s looking for something...something besides us!_ Thought Rey, stepping forward and examining the thing. “What are you looking for?” she asked aloud, as if the twenty-foot-long ticking mechanical worm would summon a human voice and answer her. The worm then stilled, going completely still as only robots could, and the ticking intensified to the point that Korsunsky clapped his hands over his ears. _It’s found it, it’s got the scent._

And the great worm lunged forward, delving back into the earth as quickly as it had emerged, disappearing into a fresh wormhole in the soil.

Rey and Korskunsky did not set to finishing with the temple, instead sitting together on the dirt overlooking their broken bikes and the massive hole into which the koschei had disappeared, contemplating the mystery of the beast together. Rey rested her saber, powered off, on her knees, ready to raise it again if necessary. It was full dark before they rose, having not worked out the motivations of the koschei -- what did it seek, and why not attack? These questions unanswered, they returned to Rey’s home.

“Did you know Korsunsky was at the Vox Fourteen?” Finn was saying to Han when they entered. “What a tragedy that was.”

“Korsunsky, here you are!” said Poe. “We’re all very glad to see you safe. I didn’t take you for an opera man. I suppose you aren’t anymore. I wouldn’t be!”

Korsunsky visibly paled at the memory of the Vox Fourteen, but nevertheless took a seat amidst the other guests and tried to be game for conversation. “I was there with Ben,” he said.

The room went quiet, all eyes turning involuntarily to Leia. Her face was neutral, but there was pain in her voice when she said, “Oh...tell me, please; how is he? Or how was he? _Where_ is he?”

“We all were worse off that night, by the end of it, but our party escaped unscathed. Ben saved my life, he did! Him and his marvelous droid. Both he and Hux have kept theirs as far as I know. Upon parting with Captain Phasma and myself they said they would go to the southern country and take their Class 3s with them. Before even the horde of aliens descended on us, Ben and I were detained by toy soldiers attempting to confiscate Kylo Ren. Ben challenged them and they nearly shot us, but then all hell broke loose with the Separatists, and the Honored Guests...we were lucky to escape with our lives. So very many didn’t.”

“Hux, too? He was uninjured?” Rey asked. She still looked at her cousin’s husband with affection.

“Oh, yes, he and his little cat-droid both. I do believe he snapped a Separatist in half, though I didn’t see it occur and don’t have the faintest idea how. He’s such a thin man.”

“It’s true that the First Order was fighting the Separatists?” Leia asked, face troubled. She’d always believed them one and the same.

“Shooting the shit out of each other,” said Korsunsky with a wane chuckle.

“Perhaps they weren’t Separatists,” suggested Han, and no one knew what to say to that.

After a time of brooding silence, Rey said, “I bet they’ve returned to Arkanis. The Academy on the southern coast. We visited them there before, myself and Finn and Poe.” she admitted, and Leia looked at her sharply.

“That place was bad for them before.” Finn murmured.

“Would any place be good for them?” Poe countered. “Not Moscow, that’s for sure.”

“We should visit them again,” Rey said.

“It’s far too dangerous,” Poe objected immediately. “We don’t know their loyalty. And with everything going on? We can’t.”

“I can’t leave my cousin to be miserable alone, either.” Rey pleaded, “They kept their droids! In open defiance of Snoke!”

“He’s not alone,” said Finn, “He’s got Hux, which is the problem.”

“ _We can’t just give up on Ben!_ ” said Rey, and then fixed her eyes on Leia. “Will you go?”

“I? And why should I go?” Leia said, her eyes growing misty. “He’s never called for me. He only once responded, long ago now. My son left us in the night and I shouted into the void after him for months with no response. He disconnected his audio unit, and only once messaged me back. And that _message!_ ” here Leia grew angry, her characteristic fire returning. “A tepid apology for his silence, an apology with no real regret, and then he wrote he’d been married three months to that foul man, and nothing else. No, I can’t forgive them. My son is...my son is _dead!_ ”

Rey gasped at that, her face a mask of horror and despair. Before she could round on her Aunt and berate her, Luke spoke.

“Leia,” he said gently. All present who had ever studied the Jedi way knew at once his meaning.

“I can’t!” she repeated. “I’m not like you, I’ve never taken to the Light as strongly, and it’s beyond my ability to forgive them.”

“Then forgive _him_ at least,” said Rey. “Forgive your son. Ben is _alive_ , Leia. We can’t abandon him. You must go and visit!”

Poe chimed in as well, supporting his wife, “Leia, I know how difficult this is for you, but it would be helpful to all of us if we could get some idea of where Ben’s loyalties lie, and you know him best.”

“I don’t know him at all!” cried Leia. “No, I won’t hear any more of this!” and she went outside.

Rey Skywalker meditated for several hours that night in place of sleep, laying on the stone floor at the foot of her bed, carefully considering her dawning understanding of the worm-machines: what they were, where they came from, and how they were connected to the other troubles plaguing Russia. They were obviously koschei, and obviously responsible for a great many northern murders. But it was incredibly unlike a koschei to ignore human prey when it was available. What motive would the Separatists have in creating a koschei that would do that? And what had been more interesting to the worm-beast than she and Korsunsky?

The talk of Ben had made her sad, and she missed her dear cousin acutely. She longed to see him and know for herself that his time off-planet had benefited him as she desperately hoped. She was angry with her aunt, and lay awake until the sun rose trying to dispel that anger, knowing that all anger was made from fear. _Fear leads to anger, and anger leads to hate, and hatred to suffering. What do I fear?_ Rey thought, and unlike her musings over the koschei, this answer came at once, and brought tears to her eyes. _I fear we’ve lost him_.

  
  


Luke Skywalker watched his daughter grow drawn and sad as she worried over her cousin’s fate. Even as spring returned life to the soil, it seemed nothing would return her to happiness other than convincing Leia to go and see Ben. So, as a father, as an uncle, as a brother, Luke made it his own mission as well to turn his sister around to the possibility of familial reconciliation. These last weeks he had sternly instructed Rey to stop badgering her aunt over the issue, offering his sister a reprieve. It was time to break it now. This would be a more difficult task than drawing her and Han back together. The wound she felt over Ben ran deeper.

The entire assembled company set out today for the beaches, gray and chilly with their rolling swells breaking on the sand, to forage for the small blue clams that had just come into season. Each of them was bundled up in gray ponchos. Leia hung back from the rest of the group, and Luke slowed his pace to walk with her.

“It’s a fine day,” he said amiably.

“Is it?” Leia smiled at him through the constant drizzle. Then, gazing ahead at the others, “We all look rather like a flock of Porgs in this gear. We look like Rey’s droid.” She laughed, but her eyes were shiny. “Would that Threepio was here. He always lifted my mood, and I miss his counsel. Oh, how I loved that robot!” The wind swept the rain up in gusts, as though the sky itself were mourning Leia Organa’s loss. “Something’s troubling you today,” she added, astute as ever.

“Oh, nothing much,” Luke said, looking aside, out over the choppy sea, and then turning back with a grin. “Thinking thoughts, which is dangerous.”

“I suppose you’ll share them with me.”

“I’ve been thinking you should forgive the little sinner, is all.” Luke referred to Ben in the same way he had done when imploring Leia to let go of much more minor offenses in Ben’s early youth, when Ben had been, in fact, little. No one who met the man now would use that descriptor. Leia pressed her lips into a line, but Luke sensed that he was not yet shut out. “Society is changing,” he said.

Leia responded to this at least. “Do you think we can win this one?”

“Who’s to say. We haven’t yet escaped. I haven’t the slightest idea how to defend ourselves, much less strike back. That was always your area.” And then, leaning in to her, “In the last war, we fought against our family. I’ve no wish to repeat it. Do you?”

“Vader was hardly--”

“Anakin, Leia. His name was Anakin Skywalker and he was our _father_ \--”

“He was a war criminal, and no father of mine. Bail was my father.”

“Anakin was my father, then, and it killed me to fight him, no matter what he had become. He’d been separated from his mother, from his wife, his children, his friends. He was isolated when he fell to the Empire, and they destroyed nearly all the Light in that man. Renamed him and turned him into something else. They tore him down and by the time it was all over there was only a sliver left of the man he’d been. He was unrecognizable. In the grand scheme of things he was just another casualty. A drop in the sea.” Luke gestured toward the ocean. “Vader is remembered. Anakin is forgotten, except by those who still live and love him. Ben hasn’t run off and signed up for the trooper program, Leia. He’s only fallen in love.”

Leia sighed at that, her face clouding with characteristic anger.

“No, listen to me,” Luke said. “He wants to live in love. We all do. The Light puts it in our hearts with no regard for our petty affairs. Look at our father and mother, at yourself and Han! So Ben left, chasing love, and now he’s alone, and society is changing. What do you see in Ben’s future, Leia?”

“He’s decided his future is separate from me.”

Luke stopped, prompting his sister to stop and stand with him. “Leia. What have _you_ decided?”

Before Leia could respond, there was a terrible shriek from just ahead. An Honored Guest leapt from an outcropping of rock mere yards from the front of their group and circled close on it’s taloned feet. Luke and Leia ran forward to catch up with the group, where Rey had already ignited her saber. Luke joined her at the front, their blades together casting blue-green light on the advancing beast.

The Honored Guest shrieked again, bubbling ochre eyes fixing on each human in their group at once. As it stalked forward, saliva dripping from its toothy jaws, another sound welled up. A humming, or a ticking, coming from the ground. The alien’s next shriek drowned out this new noise for a moment, but then the giant worm-koschei surfaced further down the beach.

It swiveled its featureless head toward them, mouth dripping that yellow goo, and the ticking intensified.

“It’s like before,” Rey said aloud, dropping her saber low, standing taller to observe.

The Honored Guest turned, forgetting their group, and instead ran toward the koschei. It clambered aboard the worm-beast as if it were mounting a speeder bike, the gray-green shades of each monster’s flesh and the ochre-yellow of eye and goo a direct match. The worm beast considered the humans before it then, the dim red sensor-lights beneath its skin flashing as it analysed them. It turned away, koschei and alien disappearing together into the ground.

Korsunsky fainted dead away on the sand.

Once everyone had been settled again within Rey’s stone house, their nerves assuaged by tea and talk, and Korsunsky quite recovered, Rey wordlessly removed her watch and gave it to Leia on her way to sit across the living room with her husbands. Leia turned to Luke, running her thumb over the face of the watch and activating it.

“I do not understand what we’ve just seen,” Leia said. “But I know that no matter who or what is behind this, Snoke is benefitting from it. The First Order has overtaken the Russian Republic, and I cannot lose my son to another war, when we lost so much in the last one. I will go to Ben.” Rey’s eyes were bright across the room as Leia used her watch to send a communique to Hux.

  
  


Ben looked at his mother’s careworn face and did not say what he was thinking: that she had grown thinner. He was conscious as his mother’s eyes raked over him that he had grown handsomer, even with his purpled scar. Her gaze told him so. He sighed and began to speak instead about himself.

“You are looking at me,” he said, “And wondering how I can be happy in my position. Separated from you and on the other side in the divide over the very future of our planet. It’s shameful to confess but I...I’m inexcusably happy, Mom. Something has happened, it’s like a dream. Like when you’re frightened and then you wake up and the horrors are gone. I live through the same misery and dread, but then when I wake up next to him I’m happy. For once I know what I want, and it’s to be with him.”

Leia smiled but involuntarily spoke more coldly than she wanted to. “I’m very glad for you.” Was this not all that she’d ever wanted for her son? His happiness? It seemed a cruel joke that the source of it would be her enemy.

Ben did not drop the subject. “What do you think of my position? How do you see me?”

“I think…” Leia began, and she would have gone on to say that they must stand up and fight, that the bond between humans and their Class 3 robots was an ancient right. That sentient androids should not be ripped from their masters and repurposed or destroyed. To ask whether Ben was willing to give up Kylo Ren when the Order reached out into the southern countryside. That the Supreme Leader was not to be trusted. She bit the words back.

“I think…” she began again, but at that instant Han blundered past them, riding one of Hux’s speeder-bikes as the man had offered, whipping around and sending a spray of dust over their heads. “This thing is out of control, Ben!” he shouted, laughing. Ben did not even glance at him.

“I don’t think anything,” Leia said. “But I’ve always loved you, and if one loves anyone, one loves the whole person. As they are and not as one would like them to be.”

Ben, dropping his eyes -- and this was a new habit Leia had not seen in him before -- pondered, trying to absorb the full significance of her words. He interpreted them as she wished, and looked back up with love in his face. “If you had any sins,” he said, “They would all be forgiven for your coming to see me now.” And Leia saw that there were tears in her son’s eyes. She grabbed his hand and squeezed it in silence, though the feel of the ring left a cold pit in her stomach.

Kylo Ren sat cross-legged on the porch, emitting a deep wine-red glow from between his plates and a calming hum from his voice box. Hux stood totally still next to him, only seeming to soften once he saw Leia looking. The urge struck Leia again to ask how Ben meant to abandon his android and thus suffer exactly as she had in the loss of Threepio.

“Well, tell me more then!” Leia said, sweeping her arm out to indicate the estate. “You’ve got stone fire pits there by the cliffs, do you light those up at night?”

At last Ben was drawn out of his melancholy humor and into pleasant conversation. He explained the layout of the Academy to his mother, indicating the sprawling land and the droids looking after it with a measure of pride in his voice. He showed her the training house he’d built for Rey’s visits out of an old entertainment space, any lawn furniture cleared to allow room to spar. He pointed out the climate emitters high above, a feat of engineering which maintained the Mediterranean terroir of this coast. Han had abandoned the bike to stand with Hux on the porch, seemingly making a nuisance of himself by standing as ramrod-straight as Hux with his hands clasped behind his back in the same way.

Once Ben was done walking her around the grounds outside, they rejoined their husbands for refreshments within one of the Academy’s windowed sunrooms. Nearly every wall in the room that opened into this one had been lined with paper books, and Leia was entranced beside herself. The smell of them was intoxicating as it mixed with the aroma of the lemon trees just outside, and to collect them must have cost a fortune. A hovering droid brought them a tray containing citrusy champagne and then whirred away. They sat across a transparisteel table as a breeze swirled around them calmly. The environment coalesced into a small bubble of paradise, as beautiful places do, and each of them melted into it, their spirits rising. Leia understood minutely how Ben could love this place. How he could love this man, if the home reflected him.

“So Hux,” Han said, draining half his glass in one swallow. “You’re a military man.”

“A General,” Hux replied, “Though I took leave after my father’s death, and again for our marriage.” He turned to Ben slightly, acknowledging him. “I will eventually return to my duties. We haven’t yet ironed out what that will look like.”

“You seem to be well off, if you don’t mind my saying. You wouldn’t need to go back.” Han mused, and Leia kicked him under the table. They’d agreed not to get into politics and he was edging close to mentioning their hatred for the First Order.

“He misses his starship,” Ben offered, eyeing Hux fondly.

“Ah,” Han said. Thinking at once of his beloved Falcon, Leia could tell. “Spacefaring duty, then?”

“Usually.”

“Well, that’s alright. None of those brawls in the capital were your doing. Heard anything about these Honored Guests of ours? Where are they from, what do they want?” Han mused.

“I haven’t heard anything yet,” Hux answered, seeming troubled by it. “The Supreme Leader will address the issue soon, I’m sure. I expect that once my leave is finished, I will be called to assist a counter strike. Speculation, of course.”

Leia and Han both held their tongues on the subject of Snoke, Ben eyeing them as though they were cats about to knock a glass from a counter.

“I’ve got an old battle droid in the greenhouse,” Hux said, changing the subject.

“What? Why didn’t you tell me?” Ben asked. “I haven’t seen it.”

“It’s in the back corner, tangled with vines. I thought I’d save it for when your father visited. Knew you wouldn’t be able to resist tinkering with it.”

Han and Ben were both looking exceedingly interested.

“Dinner is at seven,” Hux told Ben. “Have fun.”

With that, Han and Ben were up from the table, Ben chattering to his father as he and Kylo Ren led Han to the greenhouse to scope out the droid. It warmed Leia’s heart to see her son getting to spend time with Han again. Of course, it left her alone with her son’s weasley husband. When she turned back to him she saw at once that Hux’s scheme with the droid was twofold. He meant to speak with her. More than that, he wanted something from her.

“We’re having a talk, then?” she asked, sipping her drink.

“If you don’t mind,” he returned. “I have something I want to say to you.”

Leia did not respond, waiting. Left alone with him, she was disgusted, yes, as always. But she found she was also frightened of him, a fact which surprised and embarrassed her. In all her life, its trajectory mirroring that of the Empire’s war that had shaken the planet, there were few men she’d ever feared. Her biological father sprang to mind. She’d never forgiven him, not like Luke had. But there was something in Hux’s eyes that made her suddenly afraid, some quality she couldn’t grasp.

Diverse guesses of what Hux was going to say to her flashed through her brain. _He is going to ask us to stay in this place by the sea with them, this colorful place, and I will have to refuse him; or is it that he means to threaten me on behalf of his Order? Or perhaps is this about Rey, he’s going to confess he is to blame for the attack on her wedding._ All her conjectures were unpleasant, and for this reason his next utterance floored her.

“You have so much influence on Ben, he loves you both so.” Hux pleaded. “Do help me.”

Leia Organa looked with brazen inquiry into his energetic face, which in this room was lit up in patches by sunshine and then rendered in shadow as the branches of the lemon trees swayed.

“You have come to see us, for him, though you oppose the purpose I’ve taken in life and therefore oppose our union and, I think, my very existence. I know you have done this not because you regard our position as the right one but because you love him and want to be a help to him. Do I understand you rightly?” He asked, looking at her. She itched for him to look away, to blink even.

“Yes.” Leia said.

“No one feels more intensely than I do the difficulty of Ben’s position; and that you may well understand if you do me the honor of supposing I have any heart at all. I am to blame for Ben’s difficulties.”

“Yes,” Leia said again, not willing to comfort him. She ground out, trying belatedly to soften it, “He says he is happy.” At the same moment she said it, a doubt entered her mind as to whether Ben had been truthful.

Hux, it appeared, had no doubts on that matter. “Yes,” he sighed. “Ben is happy, in the present. But I? ...I am afraid of what is before us. I see that he is happy right now,” Hux repeated, and the doubt sunk deeper into Leia’s mind. “But can it last? I think not.”

Leia eyed him. “You’re not asking me for marriage advice.”

“No,” Hux sighed. “You’ve noticed his scar of course.”

“Yes.” Leia’s skin prickled at that and she fought to keep her fists from clenching. If this ginger rat of a man had hurt her son….

“He gave it to himself,” Hux said, still not dropping his gaze. Still self-sure, still bold, even in divulging this wicked fact. Leia hated him more for it. “He’d meant to do worse. Got his hands on my blaster while I slept. He didn’t realize I always leave it set to stun.”

“You’re telling me my son tried to end his life,” Leia said. She was dizzy, considering in the span of a few seconds a hundred ways to remove Ben from this place, feeling the deep ache of guilt that parents know better than anyone. Ben was an adult, yes, but Leia felt that she’d failed him in not dragging him from Hux’s side the moment she’d known what Ben had done. She’d been burnt, and she’d turned away from Ben, feeling forsaken and betrayed. Now she knew that he’d suffered in this place, with this man and without his own people. If Leia still carried a blaster of her own, she’d have drawn it and shot, to pay Hux back for the damage Ben had tried to wreak on himself under the _care_ of his husband. She could see Hux reading these thoughts on her face as his own tightened almost imperceptibly. She asked, voice a razored edge, “ _When?_ ”

“Nearly one year ago now. His temperament shifts between extremes. He is, at times, completely determined to hate himself. I fear losing him to some dark mood or another and find myself powerless to defend him against it. Whether Ben and I have acted rightly or wrongly in loving each other is a nonissue. It’s done, and we are bound together for life. He is mine,” Hux’s eyes flashed at her, “As much as I am his. And in this season of that life, the one we share, Ben is happy. Since he is happy, he does not want to see the thousands of complications that arise from our loving each other, but I can’t help seeing them. Do you understand me?”

Leia made him no answer yet, processing all that had been said, and Hux leaned in.

“I can’t help still seeing them, because I know that when Ben’s mood turns again, they will be _all that he sees_. So I’ve got to do something now, before that time comes.” Hux absently ran his fingers along Millicent’s spine. The little Class 3 was curled in his lap. She purred in acknowledgement. His mannerisms with her were plain with affection, and Leia wondered what he was getting at. Did he mean to desert the Order?

Still speechless, Leia only gazed at him.

“That brings me to the object of my conversation,” Hux said. “Ben misses you. His family. It is my hope that we can return to Moscow to be nearer to you. Though in doing so we will lose our Class 3s sooner than if we stayed here.”

“You disagree with the changes Snoke is implementing?” Leia asked at last.

“The loss of Millicent,” Hux said, “Is of a lesser concern to me than the loss of Ben’s happiness.” Though he grimaced, pain at the idea of losing his little droid evident on his face. He forged on, “But our return to society would only be a temporary balm, for higher powers have cast us against each other, haven’t they?”

“They have,” Leia said gravely. And then, perhaps more cruelly than she should, “Do you think he’ll choose you?”

“My aim is to remove the necessity of his choice,” Hux told her matter-of-factly. “I have submitted a request for the renewal of our marriage license to the Supreme Leader, and along with it a request for _amnesty_. Ben’s, and yours. Your entire family. And so it is, Tsarevna, that I am shamelessly clutching at you as an anchor of salvation. Write to Supreme Leader Snoke and give up the Republic, for Ben’s sake.”

Leia wrenched herself away from Hux’s eyes and recalled Ben's new habit of half-closing his, looking down as he thought. _Just as though he’s half-closing them against his life, so as not to see everything, as if it overwhelms him. Would that I could kill this man now where he sits._

“I cannot do this,” she told Hux, not meeting his viper’s eyes. “I can’t abandon my principles.”

Hux’s gaze burned into her even when she did not meet it. Leia felt that whatever quality in him eluded her was surfacing, and she did not have the courage to witness it. “Pity,” he said, and stood, lifting his Class 3 onto his shoulders to stalk away.

The scent of the books and lemon trees was suddenly cloying, and Leia held her hand to her face to breathe through it as she trembled in her chair.

  
  


When Ben found Leia again he looked intently into her eyes as though questioning her about the talk she’d had with Hux, but he made no inquiry in words.

“I believe it’s time for dinner,” he said.

Leia had dressed for it, changing in the interim into one of her best gowns, something of gray silk. She’d left the wool overcoat up in her room, it was too warm for it. She was astonished to see Ben in any way dressed up, accustomed to seeing him only in his silver mecanicien’s jumpsuit. But of course that was unfitting of a general’s husband. His dinner suit was simple but tailored to him, and the fabrics were fine. He wore a silver undershirt and black fitted pants along with a gray embroidered vest that recalled the style of his late grandmother Amidala. His boots had a mechanic’s grip soles but were rendered from fine black leather. Silver bracelets encircled his wrists.

“We’re too formal here,” He told her, smiling as if he were apologizing. “Armitage is delighted at your visit, he told me. And he is rarely delighted at anything. He has completely lost his heart to you.” And Ben’s face held the joyous light of the sun overhead at noon. “You’re not tired?”

But there was no time for open talk before dinner, and Leia put on a smile as he escorted her there. Everything about the dinner was compelling in its simplicity; the flasks of wine along the wooden table, candlelight brightening the room as dusk loomed close. The fare had been grown in the estate’s gardens, tended and harvested and cooked by droids.

After dinner they sat together on the terrace smoking. Or rather, Han and Hux smoked premium cigars out of a wooden box. Leia was privately alarmed to see Ben taking drags off of Hux’s cigar.

When the cigars were done they proceeded to play a quaint game that Hux and Ben had grown fond of in their time in the southern country. It was Han and Hux against Ben and Kylo Ren, each team standing on either side of a holographic net, batting a metal-feathered 1/volant back and forth with gilded nets. Leia made no attempt to play, and by the time she felt she could understand the strategy of the game she was too tired for it. She simply looked on as they played. Hux’s Class 3 had settled on her lap in his absence, and after a while began to purr, an intimacy that brought tears to her eyes in the absence of Threepio.

The others kept the game up for a long time. Hux and Ben played very well and seriously as a result of practice, and Kylo Ren mirrored Ben’s skills exactly. They kept a sharp lookout on the targets served to them, and without haste or getting in their partner’s way they ran adroitly up to them, waited for the little machines to attempt a dodge, and neatly returned them over the net. Han played the worst of the bunch. He was too eager. But, he kept the players lively with his high spirits. His laughter and outcries never paused. Han and Hux shed their coats and Ben his vest, and the sight of them together with their lively forms and perspiring faces made a picture that imprinted itself in Leia’s memory. Even Hux was rendered in a more forgiving light with his face flushed as he smiled breathlessly at Ben.

Nevertheless, Leia was not enjoying herself. She did not like the light tone of railery that was kept up between Hux and Ben. She felt disquieted by the attention that Ben’s husband paid to him. Next to the rest of them Leia felt that she was acting in a theatre with actors cleverer than she, and that her bad acting was spoiling the performance for everyone. She had come with the intention of making nice with her son’s husband and felt that she had failed in that. Hux’s whole manner caused her disquiet, but his eyes gleaming even now in the pink dusk light as if lit from within...they caused her distress.

  
  


Hux and Ben spent the whole summer and part of that winter at Arkanis Academy, and received no more social visits from family or friends. They lived as lords of their estate, and though they had taken no steps to go away anywhere, both of them felt the longer they lived alone that they could not stand this existence. They would have to alter it to go on.

To look in from the outside their life was such that nothing better could be desired. They had the fullest abundance of everything; neither desired children, they had a lavish estate, and they had each other and their beloved-companions. The keeping of the estate interested Ben greatly. He not only tuned the gardening droids but suggested a great deal of their maneuvers himself.

But Ben’s greatest concern was still of himself: he felt that Hux had given up something of his life in marrying him, and therefore was concerned with making it up to him. Hux appreciated Ben’s desire to please, which had become the sole aim of his existence at Arkanis, but at the same time he wearied of Ben’s clinging. As time went on, Hux found that these loving snares of Ben’s insecurity stifled them both, and he endeavored to test them.

Had it not been for these snares and the ways they manifested -- Ben’s fits every time Hux wanted to take a speeder-bike out alone on the property for target practice or to accompany Millicent out for a perimeter check -- Hux would have been perfectly satisfied with his life. The role Hux had taken up, that of pleasing Ben in his daily and nightly routine, fit him like a second skin, if only he could manage an hour a week away from it.

In late October, Hux returned to Ben’s arms from one of his routine scoutings along the perimeter with Millicent more enthused than previously. He explained; he encountered a holographic message left along the property line which demanded a tete-a-tete with him at a later date, flatly refusing to give him a name or any identifying information, only saying that the author wished to discuss an ‘alliance’ with Hux alone.

It was Sulis Coast autumn weather, warm and plein de soleil in the green country, and everything seemed to glow softly. But as the seasons changed and became more beautiful Ben’s moods had seemed to grow blacker. And so, in accordance with the weather, Hux prepared himself for a fight. But when he informed Ben of his intent to meet this stranger, Ben accepted the information with great composure and merely asked when he would be back. Hux was shocked at this but was loath to ruin one of Ben’s good moods, and also determined to keep his meeting.

“I hope you won’t be dull?”

“I hope not,” said Ben, “Kylo Ren and I are going to spar. No, I won’t be dull.”

 _If he’s trying to guilt me with positivity all the better,_ Hux thought. And so he made the circuit of the perimeter and waited for his tete-a-tete without appealing to Ben for candor. It was the first time since the beginning of their intimacy that they had parted without voiced grief. _I can give anything up for Ben,_ Hux thought, _but my full independence which I have relied on my whole life._

Poe stood along the perimeter of the Arkanis Academy opposite the sea, just within the creaking door of an abandoned Huntshed in a copse of forest. The building was unused yet still sheltered the Ceased bodies of three massive 2/chasse-aux-ours. Used once upon a time in Hunt-or-be-Hunted drills for cadets, the steel bear droids were frozen with their paws in positions of attack. Poe looked again down the path leading to the Huntshed and decided that this was a fool’s errand. Only when Poe was ready to take the path back to his speeder did he hear another being’s approach.

The first to appear was Millicent, her dainty copper form winding out of the underbrush and into the clear path. She glowed warmly between her plates, and settled to licking her paws and running them over her ears in the middle of the path as she waited for her master. Shortly after her, the dapper form of Hux appeared between trees.

The men sighted each other and paused, and then Hux trotted forward, extending a hand. “Poe Dameron!” he exclaimed. “Delighted! I haven’t seen you since, well, since before the wedding!”

“Yes, I quite remember that,” said Poe, blushing crimson. He turned away immediately, studying the trees. Hux sympathized; it must be terrible to have the bright memories of one’s matrimony tied with the horrors of a koschei attack. “For what reason have you requested a meeting?” Poe continued.

“Requested? No sir,” said Hux. “You mean to say that you did not leave the message I found?”

Suddenly, Millicent growled, whipped her little copper head around, and bared her tiny steel teeth in a hiss. A moment later, Hux and Poe saw what had excited the droid: it was a woman. She was wearing a dull yellow jumpsuit, her dark hair fanning out around her face, almond eyes appraising them with open distrust. She wore an amulet around her neck and clasped it in one hand, rubbing her thumb over it as if in ritual.

“Stars,” the woman said. “Hello.”

Poe raised his hand in a half-hearted wave.

“My name is Rose,” she continued. “I am afraid the ambiguity of the message is entirely mine. But I hardly could have left a note signed by the Resistance.”

“Resistance?” said Hux, bristling with automatic distrust. “Or do you mean to say you are a Separatist?” His hand twitched toward his blaster.

“Now, come on,” said the woman. “I’m hardly in a position to ask you to disarm,” her dark eyes glanced at each of their holsters in turn, “But our meeting will go more smoothly if you refrain from posturing. I am wearing an array of defensive technologies a generation ahead of anything you have access to. We’ve been working hard.”

Poe looked at her, appraising. Why was she so familiar? “What do you want?”

“Each of you,” Rose said, “Could be a powerful enemy of the force which threatens our galaxy. You already understand what the Resistance took years to come around to; our benevolent protectors in the high branches of government are neither benevolent nor protective. Soon all the planet will know it. And they will need new leaders.” The strange woman turned to Poe directly and looked him in the eye. “Dameron, we beg you to travel with your household off-planet, and keep your wife safe until the Resistance rises beneath her feet.”

Hux sneered at her. “You _are_ a Separatist. You ask us to enter into a conspiracy against the Order with you. It’s you who has brought violence to our streets is it not? The koschei, the Honored Guests? What other power calls them forth?”

“The Resistance has committed none of the violent acts that will be attributed to us by your Order,” Rose said fiercely. “We oppose the Order not in offense but in defense. We dislike the orders given, the path Snoke demanded technology travel. But we do not create darkness. We only rise to meet it.” The woman leaned forward, her eyes welling with emotion, “We’ve not instigated this war! Neither have the Separatists of old, few of whom survive today. The Order wants to control people, so it must protect them, and to protect them, it needs something to protect them from! The Order has brought the koschei and the Honored Guests down upon its own society!”

Hux snorted with derision and shook his head, but Poe trembled like a man hearing the word of God. He was moved beyond words seeing the tears moving down Rose’s face.

“I apologize,” she said, rubbing at her face with her sleeves. “But I have spent my whole life outside of possibility and now that I look the past in its face I feel...hope.”

BOOM!

The forest exploded into flames.

“No!” cried Rose, “An emotion bomb! I should have known!”

BOOM! A second hope-bomb rattled the treeline and brought a twisting fruit tree down before them, its leaves ablaze. All three of them fell to the earth, covering their ears against the blasts and faces against the flames.

BOOM! A third blast tore the roof from the Huntshed. Poe saw the tops of the Ceased Huntbears glinting in the fire before a burning timber landed across his back.

He screamed in terrible pain and Hux rushed to his side, tearing the timber away and laying flat across his back, causing him agony but extinguishing him. Hux yelled at Rose, “You’ve trapped us here, you’ve killed us!”

“I did not plant these bombs!” shouted Rose, staggering to her feet. “But I can stop the hope that provokes them! Remember these words, men. Rearguard...action.” She tampered with a gadget on her wrist, and was gone. No further bombs detonated, there was only the eerie crackling of the forest.

“Rearguard…” intoned Poe, as if hypnotized.

“Action,” Hux mumbled. He had agreed to this tete-a-tete because he was attracted to adventure, but he had not imagined it would so keenly interest and excite him.

Once he had gotten Poe up and examined his injuries, Hux offered him a cigarette from his tin, and they smoked together. Standing side by side in front of the charred Huntshed they seemed perfect allies, though Poe did not tell Hux of his family’s buried Class 3’s and Hux did not speak to Poe of Ben.

They smoked and talked in breathless tones of what they had just seen, when Millicent chirped and displayed a message. It was from Ben, expected. Ben asked after him and hoped he would hurry home. The idea of returning home with his blood still hot from adrenaline displeased Hux though he knew it shouldn’t. Still, he bade Poe goodbye, asking after his ability to get himself to his speeder. Assured the man would make it home safely, Hux started his own trek back to his estate.

  
  


Before Hux’s departure, Ben had reflected that his fits when Hux parted from him only served to make him colder, and resolved to control himself this time. But the cold, severe glance Hux had given him when he informed him he was leaving for his tete-a-tete had wounded Ben, and before Hux had gone Ben’s peace of mind was already destroyed.

In solitude afterward, as Ben practiced his fighting forms with Kylo Ren, he came, as he always did, back to his own humiliation. “Hux has the right to go away,” he complained to Kylo. “To leave me here. He has every right and I have none to be upset. But knowing that I am upset, he ought not to do it. We came here together...years ago, nearly three years ago already, and we’ve defied our parties together in our love and what does he do? He leaves me alone.”

Kylo Ren glowed sympathetically and he countered Ben’s moves. “He ought not to,” repeated the droid.

“What has he done?” Ben mused, “He looks at me coldly when he thinks I’m in an ill mood. Of course that is indefinable, but a glance means a great deal. A glance shows the beginning of indifference.”

“Indifference,” Kylo Ren echoed.

And though Ben felt sure that a coldness between himself and his husband was growing just as a slight chill now grew in the winds that tore through the garden, there was nothing he could do. “All I have is love,” he told Kylo, “And that will be enough to keep him or it won’t. Only, I am afraid.”

There was still one means to further cement himself next to Hux, and Ben could not speak it. It meant denouncing his family to the Order, and it meant giving up their Class 3s in following Order directives. As dusk approached Ben could not stand it any longer and directed Kylo Ren to contact Millicent. Ben felt that Hux could be weary of him and it would be better still to have Hux beside him, even if his looks were cold.

Ben sat in the drawing room beside the entry, listening to the sounds of the estate. There were precious few of them at night with all the droids in Cease. There was only the wind and the distant sounds of the forest, and then finally, mercifully, the sound of Hux and Millicent unlocking the door.

Kylo Ren’s eyebank flickered affectionately as Millicent bounded in and up into the other droid’s arms. Ben, flushing hotly, got up. Even before Hux appeared Ben was thinking of him, all of him, his hands, his eyes. Ben met him joyfully.

“How are you?” Hux asked, settling on the bench in the entryway to take off his boots, his hat, and lay them aside.

Ben didn’t answer, taking one of Hux’s hands and drawing it to his waist. He held it there for only a moment and then Hux squeezed him, fingers digging in with a strength that his skinny frame shouldn’t hold, and here was the passion Ben had wanted all day.

“I’m glad,” Hux said, as though Ben had told him he was well, and used Ben’s frame to draw himself up to kiss him.

It wasn’t until later that either of them spoke a word other than each other’s names or hushed one-word requests. They left a trail of clothing up the stairs. They lay side by side in their bed, sweating and sated, nude between their sheets. Ben rested his face exactly in the crook between Hux’s shoulder and neck, smelling his skin, and Hux trailed his fingers in circles over Ben’s back languidly. Hux told Ben about his tete-a-tete, about meeting Rose and about her disappearance, about Poe and the hope-bombs. Ben was practiced in asking the questions that would bring Hux around to what pleased him most -- his own success. And then Ben told him about everything that interested him most in Ben’s management of the estate. In this way their evening was spent happily, and Ben, sensing that he had regained complete possession of his husband, wished to banish Hux’s cold glances for good.

“You were annoyed with me when you left,” he said.

“Vexed, and sorry for it.” Hux said. It wasn’t enough.

“Vexed?”

“I’m only vexed that you seem unwilling to admit there are duties--”

“The duties of traipsing about with your cat and smoking with Dameron by the Huntshed?”

“Let’s not talk about it.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to fight with you.”

“We’re just talking.”

“I only meant that I do need to check our perimeter. These hope-bombs, who planted them? Why? When?”

“Another reason to abandon me here.”

“Oh, Ben, why are you so irritable? I must leave the house, yes. You’re free to do the same. Don’t you know that I can’t live without you?”

“You come and go with no care for me.”

“That’s cruel. I am ready to give up my whole life for you as you’ve done--”

But Ben did not hear him. “If you have any more invitations I will go with you. If you need to check the perimeter I will go with you. There’s no need to separate.”

“Ben, are you lonely?”

“I’m perfectly fine, only you avoid me,” Ben said bitterly even as he nuzzled his face into Hux’s neck.

And here was the opening Hux had been looking for. “Perhaps our life is not sustainable here.”

Kylo Ren seemed to know the direction this talk would take before it commenced, beckoning Millicent into his lap as he sat in the armchair in the corner and holding her, stroking her. The little cat-machine climbed eagerly into the android’s embrace and enjoyed his attentions, purring loudly.

“I applied for amnesty along with our marriage license,” Hux said. “I know that your family is loath to accept it. But perhaps if we moved back to the city, if we were nearer to them…”

“Moved,” Ben said slowly. His mind was spinning. “Yes. Yes, we should move back. Mom will see… It was so good when they visited wasn’t it? But tomorrow I will go with you to check the perimeter.”

“You talk as if you were threatening me,” Hux chuckled, “I desire nothing except to never be parted from you.”

Even as he said these words there was sadness about him, echoed in Ben. Their droids sat silently at the edge of the room, unacknowledged. To call to them on the cusp of their destruction was too painful. Hux and Ben stared at each other, brown eyes boring into green, and then nodded as one. They sat up in bed and turned toward Millicent and Kylo Ren.

Millicent sat completely upright in Kylo’s lap, at attention like a tiny soldier. Kylo Ren lowered his head slightly, not wanting to make a difficult moment worse for his beloved master. Ben slid out of bed and reached toward them, hitting the Cease switch on Kylo Ren’s neck and then Millicent’s.

Within the week Hux and Ren purchased an apartment in Moscow and established themselves there as a married couple even as they waited for their license. For months they waited, hearing nothing from the offices of the Supreme Leader on the question of their marriage or Ben’s amnesty, and like a slow-boiling pot they simmered. But the festering displeasure of Snoke was not limited to his star general and his general’s Republic-bred husband.

All of the planet suffered with them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 3 more chapters left! The last two will be published at the same time for reasons that will be immediately apparent. Thanks for reading!


	5. THE NEW HOPE

When the Class 2 robots were taken just as the Class 3s had been, the Skywalker household -- including Luke -- had been three months in Moscow. Rey would have preferred that they all stay nearer to Arduinna and Luke’s ancestral home, and nearer to their buried droids. But Poe was determined to keep his promise to Rose, which meant staying near the Organas and their starship. Poe Dameron did not attempt to dictate their life to his partners, he only shared his fervor with them and they were convinced.

Rey and Poe and Finn humorously and self-consciously called their vision of their future, wherein their beloved BB8 and Porg could come home, their “New Hope.” They felt proud and romantic about their determination to see this vision become reality. Leia and Han visited them often and they were all in agreement with each other on the greater questions of life. Leia and Luke in particular delighted in daily communication with each other.

The only thing that spoiled the charm of Moscow for Rey was that her husbands were different here than where she loved to see them most, in the ancient stone city by the sea that she and Luke had called home her whole life. She liked them serene and friendly as they were there. Here, Finn was continually on his guard, ducking away from trooper patrols left and right. Poe, too, was uneasy. He was always afraid of missing something, and Rey felt sorry for him. Poe was in a continual hurry, afraid of being found out, ready to leap into action should someone call out to him with the mysterious phrase Rose had used...and Rey often mused over Rose now, thoughts of her friend living this other life, this Resistance life, came to her at every turn. She longed to contact her, but Rose did not respond to her messages now, leaving her in the dark. It troubled Rey, adding on to her anxiety about her husbands. She saw that neither man was himself in the city and she worried over their inability to order their lives here. 

One obvious example was that though Poe had, in his life before her in Moscow, hated the gentlemen’s clubs near the Senate building with a passion, he now felt that he must spend time in them, and he came home ill-tempered. Poe felt sure that if there were more travellers to be found, the clubs were where he would find them, because of the ease with which one became anonymous within them. Rey supported him the best she could. She had suggested once that the next traveller would simply find him as the first had, but saw that Poe suffered from having nothing to do. She had no choice therefore but to pick up his pieces as best she could whenever he returned from his latest unsuccessful excursion. They must advance their New Hope, after all. One advantage of city life was that it so united them against the aspects of society they disliked that they had no quarrels between them.

One event, an event of great importance to both, was Rey’s accidental meeting with Hux. Rey did not go often into high society as she had not grown up in it and therefore it was strange and upsetting to her, but she went once in her third month of life in Moscow. Her godfather Lando Calrissian, who had always been especially fond of her, had insisted on bringing her and her father to one of his establishments for a night out, and there she met Hux again.

Upon seeing Hux in his civilian clothes, without his blaster or hot-whip and without his lovely little Class 3, her breath failed her. Before she had thought through her actions she had crossed the room to him and taken his arm in her hand, pulling him away from his conversation with people in Order uniforms.

“Millicent,” she said, her face a mask of despair. “Oh Mr. Hux, I’m so sorry.”

Hux was taken aback at the sight of her, it had been a long time, and here was Ben’s cousin again with her large energy contained in a small frame, her plaintive eyes looking up at him. Then her words hit and tears came to his eyes. He blinked them back and excused himself from his group -- _I beg your pardon, this is my dear cousin. Yes, see you next week, Phas_ \-- and then he was following her back to Luke.

Poe had told Rey every detail of his encounter with Rose, of course, including Hux’s involvement, but Rey could hardly bring that up here. Hux said a few words to Luke and Lando, saying nothing at all. It was not until he bade her father and godfather goodbye and turned to her that Rey had the courage to speak, in whispered tones, of the great secret that lay between them. The Resistance.

“You and Ben have returned here?” In the urgency of her whisper was her hope and expectation that their request for amnesty, as she had overheard spoken of between Luke and Leia, was a gambit, a cover story, and that Hux was in Moscow for the same reason as Poe: awaiting the chance to move against the Supreme Leader.

“Ben Solo and I,” said Hux, “Only wish to make amends for our reluctance in adopting the new laws. We have surrendered our Class 3s,” he continued, and this time his pain did not leak from his eyes, “And appealed to the Supreme Leader for amnesty for Ben’s entire family, yourself included. I have many skills, of course, that could be put to use in service of the First Order as it completes its new directives.”

Rey could not determine whether Hux was playing false in this public space or whether he was sincere. Just as she remembered him, General Hux remained a captivating mystery. His veiled eyes fixed on hers and he seemed not to blink, or else was doing it exactly when she was.

On the way home, she was grateful to her father for saying nothing about Hux, but he was especially warm after their visit which she knew was to comfort her. Rey hoped against all odds that Hux’s speech had been a front and that her beloved cousin and his husband would join her in her New Hope. She stowed away her love for her cousin and her girlish admiration for Hux, whose beautiful little robot had inspired her little Porg, at the bottom of her heart, and resolved to do her best to sound out his true loyalties if they should meet again.

Poe flushed a great deal when she told him she had met Hux at Lando’s bar. He and Finn had leaned in, as much her co-conspirators as her husbands, as she relayed to them what Hux had said. They pondered the difficulties of it together. If General Hux had truly turned his back on Rose’s pleas, surely there was danger that he would report them to the Supreme Leader.

“I’ll meet with him again tomorrow,” said Poe. “Leia’s already asked me along with her to dinner with Ben. I’ll speak to Hux and then, together, the three of us will decide what to do.” He emphasized the word together to reassure Rey that she had not acted wrongly in approaching Hux.

“I miss Porg, and BB8,” Rey sighed.

“Me too,” Finn empathized, drawing her into his arms and kissing her forehead.

  
  


The following night, Poe reached the club just at the right time. Members and visitors were driving up as he arrived. Poe had not been to this club in a very long time, not since he lived in Moscow, when he’d just graduated flight school and was taking a turn in society. He remembered this club, the details of it, but he had forgotten the impression it made on him. It was a golden confectionary even down to the coatroom. It’s different levels opened up in the center to display a bar made out of a tangle of pipes and gears and working mechanisms. As he ascended the sweeping red-carpeted staircase up to the main level, his identity was verified by the rotating 1/Statue/9, the glittering form of a woman clad in Old Republic robes.

There were differences, of course, between the past and the present. In his younger days even if he had never appreciated all of club culture, he was awed by their splendor and enjoyed making fast friends over a drink or a game. Today, there was nothing here that did not turn his stomach as he took in the heaving crowd of Order personnel, some of them with _modifications_ in the vein of their Supreme Leader. Ocular sensors, mech inlaid into their hands -- not necessary like a limb replacement. And of course, in the past the club had been bustling with Class 3s, and BB had rolled around next to him the whole night long. Now, there was no whirring and droning of motors. Skirting a slow old woman to mount the landing, Poe entered the dining room with all its noise and people.

He walked along the tables, and they were almost all full. He looked at the visitors, old and young and Republican and First Order, and did not see a cross or worried face among them. They had left their anxieties downstairs with their coats and hats, and were mingling to enjoy society’s material blessings. Among the faces of the crowd he at last found the one he sought.

“There you are. You’re late,” Leia told him warmly as he met her by the bar.

“Jet Juice,” Poe told the surly human bartender, and Leia waved her hand crossly.

“He’ll have a Gold Squadron Lager,” she corrected, and then lower, to Poe, “I need your wits about you, Dameron.” They gathered their drinks and returned to Leia’s table.

“And here they are,” Leia said, handing the extra beer she held to Ben. That left the Imperial Red she’d given to Poe for Hux. Poe handed it over, holding eye contact with him, looking for...Poe didn’t know what. Hux’s face was serene. He took his wine from Poe and tapped his husband’s shoulder, leaning in to whisper something to him, and then he set down the glass and held his hand back out to Poe with a sharp grin.

“Very glad to see you, Dameron,” he said, and then added with a wink -- had he winked? Poe thought so -- “It has been a long time!”

“Yes,” said Poe, head swimming. Had it been? Yes, certainly. Months. But also considerably less time than since Poe had last seen Ben. In the next moment, Leia said something that made Ben laugh uproariously, throwing his head back and smiling wide. Hux turned to look at Ben, his own grin softening minutely. Leia and Ben carried on, Ben leaning in close to speak and laugh with his mother.

Poe judged that the moment was right. He leaned forward, and, laying one hand on Hux’s forearm, whispered the code word they’d both heard from Rose.

“Rearguard.”

For a long moment, the world stilled between them. The chatter of the room was dampened as if they’d ducked underwater, and the music floating down from the upper levels seemed to pause on one shimmering note. Poe sought a sign of life in the impassive face across from his, and how was it that Hux could sit so still? The General did not say “Action.” Instead he laughed meaninglessly as though Poe had told him a joke, and turned back toward Ben.

Poe’s worst suspicions were confirmed. The Resistance, if it truly existed, could not count General Hux among its ranks. But what danger did that pose to Poe? To his partners, to Luke and Leia? What should he do? He wished he had BB8 with him to run an analysis.

“Let’s move on from here,” Leia suggested. “You kids are so good at games.” She led them to the gambling tables. 1/dice propelled themselves across a table in geometric patterns, randomizing some players into fortunes and some into debts. But they’d no more than approached the table when a group of Order officers all with _enhancements_ \-- and this produced an instant melancholy disdain in Poe -- strode purposefully up to the table and addressed them.

“I apologize for the interruption, Tsarevna. We are here to dispose of these apparatuses.”

“The gambling?” asked Leia incredulously.

“The Class 1s,” the officer said mildly. “There are many enemies threatening our world, enemies above and below and within. The open distribution of technology is too dangerous to permit.” The officer’s ocular implant shot out a neat laser beam and reduced the dice table to ash. He then cleared his throat and said, “I ask that you place your personal Class 1 belongings on the floor in front of you.”

Into a large pile it all went: heirloom 1/horloges, 1/cig-lighters, even 1/bifocals. All the tiny wonders that rendered their lives more convenient. Poe eyed Hux throughout the exchange and saw that the man was loath to remove the watch Rey had gifted him and then agonized over his lighter. It was engraved with a message that Poe was too far to read, but it wasn’t hard to guess the subject, as it was followed by a date and Ben’s looping signature. Ben put an arm around him and murmured comforts against his ear, and Hux relinquished the device. The heap was vaporized as completely as the table had been, and then the officers turned on their black boot heels and left. In their wake was stunned silence.

“I’ll get our coats,” said Poe, moving to do so. Hux and Ben stood with him outside the club entrance, lingering after Leia said her farewells.

“Let’s not end the night like this,” Ben said, and his eyes were misty like they got when he’d been drinking or when he was truly overcome with emotion, both of which applied now. “Poe, you were a true friend of mine for so many years, and I am sorry to have drifted apart. And Hux is my greatest love. You are both so very dear to me, and I want you to know you ought to be friends, great friends.”

Hux laughed. “Well then there’s nothing but for us to be friends.” He said playfully.

_I can pretend as well,_ thought Poe. He clapped Hux on the shoulder.

  
  


Ben and Hux’s new home was small but extravagant, eschewing the popular silver durasteel style for dark bronze panels and delicate painted wallpaper. Passing through the dining room to move upstairs to the study, Poe noticed the large portrait hanging on the wall, and could not help stopping to look at it. It was the portrait of Ben, painted on the moon by the doomed Mitaka. Poe gazed at the portrait, which seemed to stand out from its frame, so real it was, and could not tear himself away from it. It was as if he was looking at the charming, living Ben with his black curling hair and pale skin, his pensive expression rendered ethereal by the glow of his companion robot, now lost to him. For Kylo Ren stood also in the portrait behind his master, triumphantly looking out at the viewer through his black faceplate.

“This is remarkable,” Poe said at last, remembering himself.

“Yes,” Hux agreed, though his face was sad. They settled themselves in Hux’s study, where Hux pulled a cigarette out of his tin before remembering the loss of his lighter and setting it sadly aside.

“I can’t offer you a smoke,” he said irritably. “I’ve got gin?”

“That will do nicely,” Poe said, accepting a glass.

“It’s so strange to see you without BB8,” said Ben, and hearing his droid’s name spoken aloud shocked Poe. “I confess I’m ill at ease, I don’t feel myself without Kylo Ren.”

Poe laughed incredulously and then smiled with genuine pleasure at this forthrightness. It was refreshing to hear someone speak openly of the great collective loss of Class 3s. Poe had least expected to hear such an admission here, sitting across from Hux.

“I never really told you,” Ben continued, “I am delighted that Rey has found a good man in you. You are my closest friends.” He dropped his eyes suddenly, as though recalling something.

“Excuse me,” said Hux, “It occurs to me I must send a communique before bed. Captain Phasma is expecting word from me by morning. Bloody hell, my comms unit is a Class 1! Yes, I ought to send it now before either of us has our tech destroyed.” with a roll of his eyes he picked his way delicately between chairs and out of the room.

In Hux’s absence Poe felt the urge to spill his heart to Ben, too. To tell him that he had wit and honor but above that, truth. Ben had no wish to hide the bitterness of his position. Instead, he leaned forward meaningfully, and whispered urgently: “Rearguard.”

Ben’s face twitched and slackened, his bleary eyes coming up to Poe’s. There was recognition there. Hux had told Ben about their encounter with Rose, Poe saw. His heart was hammering. Perhaps he’d pushed his luck too far and this was the misstep that would force Hux’s hand in reporting him.

Ben leaned forward too, with his elbows on his knees, hands hanging loosely. “Action.” He said it clearly and neutrally.

They both stared at each other for a long moment.

“I ought to go,” said Poe. “Rey expected me over two hours ago.”

“You tell my cousin that I love her, and that if she cannot pardon my marriage now then my wish for her is that she never pardon it. To love me except from afar is to go through what I do, and may she be spared that.”

“Yes,” said Poe, stomach sinking. “I’ll tell her, but --”

“Goodnight,” said Ben with finality.

All the way home, Poe reeled with excitement and hope. He could not wait to share with Rey and Finn what he had learned: that Ben Solo, despite his return to Moscow and the petition for amnesty, remained in his heart loyal to his lost Class 3 and to the society in which they had walked together.

  
  


Poe found his wife and husband low-spirited. They had dined with Luke that night and been merry for a time, but after Luke left them for his room they had waited up for Poe, felt dull, and then worried for him as the night stretched on. How tiresome it was not to have BB8 and send communiques straight to Rey through Porg.

Poe apologized for having kept them waiting, embracing each in turn with a kiss.

“What have you been doing?” Rey asked. “You didn’t stay at the bar so late?”

“No, no. A group of Order flunkies came in and torched all the Class 1s! We left then.”

Rey clapped a hand over her mouth in dismay. “Even Class 1s? Will they leave us nothing?”

“Nothing!” said Poe, swinging his arms out theatrically. “They even took the old folks’ looking glasses. Hux had to give up a lighter that Ben must’ve gotten him -- it was engraved -- and even he seemed about to cry.”

“Hux,” said Rey. “How did he seem to you? I mean, is he…?”

Poe shook his head. “I fear Leia saw more of his truth than you did, my love. He’s decidedly on the other side. I don’t think he intends to turn us in, for Ben’s sake. At least for now, we’re safe. But he’s not with us.”

Finn spoke up, “So you left the bar after your Class 1s were taken, and then?”

“Ben invited me back to their home.”

Finn reached out and took Poe’s arm, “There’s more you’re not telling us.”

“I’m getting there. Anyway, we went back to their apartment, and when Hux retired early, fussing about his comms unit, I spoke with Ben.”

Rey’s eyes were bright, alert. “Ben,” she breathed, smiling even as she said his name. She missed her cousin, Poe knew. Fear for her husbands had kept her away from him, fear of what Hux could do if he was provoked.

“Rey, Ben remains one of us. He responded to the code word immediately with Hux out of the room. I’m convinced he holds our views. He could be useful.”

Rey’s face lit up like a sun. Finn was more reserved, but his features softened too. He was especially vulnerable to Rey’s contagious mirth. “We’ve got to help him!” Rey declared.

“We’ll all be dead if we set Hux off,” Finn warned, voice gentle.

“We’ve got to move carefully,” Poe agreed. “Carefully, and together.”

They sat at their kitchen table until three o’clock talking over future scenarios, puzzling out the form of their New Hope.

After Poe left, Ben did not go to Hux. He instead paced the study, thinking. Oh, how he missed Kylo Ren when his mind was unsettled, his thoughts indistinct and troubling. Meeting with Poe and his mother had reawakened a poignant feeling of familial love in Ben that was largely missing from his life.

But what had Poe meant by that strange word, and how had Ben known the response? The answer was in his memories, but it was muddy without Kylo Ren to play the correct one over again for him. His response had clearly resonated with Poe. Somehow Ben had known the exact right thing to say. It had something to do with Hux, with the old estate. Rey’s visit? Ben might have paced the room all night thinking it over and growing no closer to the answer, if Hux had not come back in and drawn him from his reverie.

“I apologize. I did manage to catch Phasma! What luck. Has Poe gone?”

“Yes, he knew Rey would be missing him. How did you like him, having met again? Truly.”

“Very much.” Hux held out his hand, palm open, and Ben laid his in it, glad of this offer of tenderness. “You enjoyed seeing them,” Hux observed. “Oh, that I could give you peace of mind. I am ready to do anything to make you happy. There is nothing I wouldn’t do to save you from distress of any sort, Ben.” He brought Ben’s hand up to his mouth, kissed his fingers softly.

“I don’t know myself,” Ben said. “Whether it’s the fact they don’t visit, or that I feel I can’t go to them, or just my own nerves… I feel on the brink of calamity. I am afraid of myself....Let’s not talk of it any more.”

“Ben! What is this?” Hux demanded, horrified at the despair radiating off his husband, drawing him into his arms.

Ben did not say what haunted him in his solitary hours, which was that in their years together beside the love which bound them had also grown strife, and that he had tried and could not exorcise it from his heart. With his husband’s arms around him and his face buried in the crook of his neck, Ben thought of his parents’ home and of the steady droid-tuning work he’d done and of Rey’s visits each summer, and thought, _What have I done? What have I traded for this love, that I so fear losing it? Should this prove no more than an illusion, I will have nothing._

“Take me to bed,” Ben pleaded, “And make me forget everything.”

Hux did.

  
  


At five o’clock the creak of the bedroom door opening woke Poe. He sat up and looked around. Only Finn was in bed beside him, but there was a light moving in the bathroom, and he heard quiet retching.

“What is it?” he said, half asleep. “Rey?”

“Nothing,” her muffled voice. She peeked her head into the doorframe, seated on the floor, with a candle in her hand. They’d found a box of them in the attic after a group of officers had called on their home around one o’clock to confiscate their Class 1s. “I’m unwell. I’m sure it’s nothing. I’ll come back to bed now.” She blew out her candle and did so, climbing between Poe and Finn as she always did.

Poe was so sleepy he fell back into his dreams at once. At seven o’clock she woke him again with a touch on his shoulder. She seemed to be struggling between regret at waking him and the need to talk to him.

“Don’t be frightened,” she said. “It’s all right, but… could you send for a doctor?” The candle was lit again and she sat up in bed.

Poe hurriedly jumped up, hardly awake, and dressed as quickly as he could. He woke Finn before he left so that Rey would have someone looking after her.

Poe broke out into the morning air, the streets just barely light, and took off on foot at a sprint.

The nearest doctor was not up, and his footman said he’d left orders not to be troubled, but Poe shouted at him until he went to wake the man anyway.

Poe waited impatiently in the street for the doctor, and finally decided that he could wait no longer and would burst in on the man and wake him himself. He turned and stormed back toward the doctor’s door --

And came face to face with Rose, holding a small silver box. “Rearguard,” she said.

“Action,” Poe said automatically.

“We must speak,” Rose told him.

“I can’t, I have urgent business!”

“Not so urgent as this. The time has come.”

“No, it cannot be now!” Poe protested, his voice rising. “My wife is ill!” He made to push past Rose, and she pressed a button on her little box.

Poe found himself enclosed in a box of holographic bars, unable to move through them. His eyes wide with rage, he reached through to grab at the woman who had imprisoned him. “I’m with you!” he cried. “I swear that if you find me later I will help you any way you can, but I must go to my wife now!”

“We cannot wait. We have a chance to stop the furnaces, to save the Class 3s. But we require you now.”

“Then you must find another man!” Poe threw himself at the bars. “You must free me!”

Rose did so as he thrashed at the bars again, her face contorted in concern. With another press of the button, the cage disappeared. Poe made for the doctor’s doorbell -- now an actual metal bell posted outside the door -- ringing it furiously.

“Think of society!” said Rose, and when this had no effect, “Do it for your Class 3s!”

Poe turned and hissed, “What of them?”

“BB8 and Porg have been captured, recovered in a raid on the Arduin realms. They are being brought here now, to be melted down with the others. Unless we stop it. And we can! You can stop it!”

Poe, feverish with the desperate need to return to Rey’s side, shook his head rapidly as though dispelling Rose’s words from it, and rang the doctor’s doorbell again.

When Poe returned with the doctor, Luke was up as well, sitting at the kitchen table. “You better go on up,” he said warmly, acting as if he knew much more than Poe did. Poe paid him no mind in his haste to get back to Rey. He found her as he’d left her, in bed with Finn. She was propped up against the headboard and Finn was holding a bowl for her to be sick into, holding her hair back, murmuring comforts at her.

The doctor approached, had a terse conversation with them that Poe could hardly hear over the ringing in his ears. He was certain somehow that this was the end, that he’d been granted too much happiness by accident and now the universe must account for its error. Rey’s illness from before their marriage had surely returned and this time it would take her, or worse...it would be the unspeakable horror of Kuruk Ren’s fate.

The doctor took a device out of his bag -- were they still allowed Class 1s or had his medical bag just not yet been ransacked? -- and ran the sensor over Rey’s forehead, across her pulse points. It’s screen displayed the prognosis and the doctor read it to her. Her face was blank, wondering. Finn’s mouth hung open.

The doctor left, and clapped Poe on the back on his way out. “Congratulations, young man.”

“Congrat...congratulations…” Poe said, in a haze, walking slowly to the bed where Finn and Rey gazed up at him. “What?”

“Poe,” Rey said breathlessly, “We’re going to have a baby.”

Poe went to her, kissed her face. It was wet with tears and he did not know if they were hers or his. He crawled back into bed, only pausing to kick his shoes off, and lay with his partners in a happy bubble late into the day. As the hours passed he thought once of BB8. And then his mind passed on, back to what was before him: to Rey and Finn, and the new life beginning because of them. This was a time for humans.

  
  


Leia Organa’s affairs were in a bad way. She had given up the majority of her parents' wealth; distributing it to the people was her last act as the remaining member of the royal family, and her life as a Senator had not been glamorous -- she’d had some savings from her Republic salary, but those were now running out after paying off Han’s most egregious debts. They had moved out of their old apartment above the workshop and into a smaller one nearer to Rey, further from the city center. Leia and Han did not have the funds to go on living in Moscow much longer, and Rey had offered them room and board, but they resolved they would not burden Rey’s generosity. Their sole property that was completely paid off was the Falcon, and when the money was nearly gone they would launch from the planet, they had decided.

Leia had been notified that she would need to pick up her last credit payment physically, on a holocard, because the transfer system using Class 3s was of course no longer viable. It meant going directly to Snoke’s office in the ministry, and she was tempted to skip it altogether, except that the sum would purchase two rounds of fuel for the Falcon. They needed it. She also would ask after her son’s marriage license. Perhaps she could reassure Snoke of Ben’s separation from her family, grant him this one thing for him that would make him happier. She felt in her heart that the days in which Ben might have left his husband to accompany his parents into space were gone, and worried about leaving him poorly.

Leia entered Snoke’s study on the top floor of what once was the Senate building, and managed to keep her face neutral with some effort. The pitted metal mask that had once disfigured only half of Snoke’s face was now spread like a caul over his entire visage, horribly sunken in on the side it had originally inhabited. The oculus on that side had been built in to replace his eye, and it protruded from the socket now to look at her with a series of clicks. He wore a reading device over his other eye, not a standard Class 1 but something new. Holo-net pages flashed by on it too fast for her to grasp. He rested his right arm on his desk, the hand curled around a cup of tea that looked to have gone cold long ago.

“Questions,” said Snoke in a bitter sing-song voice. “This journalist has questions. You see, my dear Tsarevna Organa, she feels in her heart that the Russian people deserve answers. Answers they shall have. Answers they shall have.”

Leia walked forward, stopping in front of his desk, and waited.

“Questions,” he said again, spitting the word. “This woman named Dubois, she has doubts about the collection of Class 1 devices. She feels that this latest decree from myself, carried out by my loyal officers for the safety and security of our fellow citizens, may have been a bit too far for the people of the United Realms. _Yet it is the role of the Supreme Leader and his Ministry to determine what is best for the people of the United Realms._ ”

“Yes, so it is said.” Leia spoke up. “But people did enjoy their petites-liberties.”

“I operate,” said Snoke, his reading device switching off, “under another principle, one embracing a larger vision of freedom.” His voice emerged from his non-face as if from the depths of a metal well. “These devices do not grant freedom, they take it. They take away our potential as a species. I pursue politics for the public good. And the public,” he said, tilting his head, “cannot grasp that they are taken up with personal interests. They will learn to regret.”

Snoke pressed a button on his desk and a tall trooper entered in his white full-body armor, carrying an automatic high-caliber blaster, the red sigil on his shoulder marking him as a unit leader.

“Dubois, _l’Observateur_.” Snoke murmured to the imposing soldier, and the man saluted and left the chamber.

Leia knew that it was pointless to protest, and refrained. Snoke eyed her a moment longer, or at least what passed for eyeing now, and then slid a holocard across his desk toward her. She took it and slid it into her pocket.

“Will you hear a question from me?” Leia asked him.

“I will do precisely as I choose,” Snoke told her. Leia took it as permission.

“There is something I want to talk to you about, and you know what it is. About my son, Ben.”

Snoke suddenly flung the teacup he held against the wall. It shattered loudly and tea dripped down in a dismal brown stain. He brought his other arm up and slammed it on the desk, and Leia noticed that Snoke’s left arm, like his face, was now plated entirely with metal. Having recovered from his fit, he flexed his hand -- the metal one -- and the ceramic splinters of the teacup on the floor came together again seamlessly.

“What is it that you want from me?” He asked.

“A definite settlement of his position. I come to you not as a political figure but as a mother.”

“A mother seeking pity. I had imagined. Yes, for her son’s awful position in this society. Armitage Hux has everything he desires for himself. I have allowed him everything...to take filth into his bed, to go, to return, to carry on unmolested, to submit inquiry after inquiry directly to this office…” and here his voice seemed to transform, taking on the low timbre of a booming roar. The seams where his metal plates connected glowed to life, a deep, menacing red.

“AND YET HE SENDS THIS WORM, THIS HORRID SPECIMEN OF HUMANITY, TO PLEAD FOR FAVORS? FOR FORGIVENESS?”

Snoke threw back his head and laughed, a shrieking sound like metal scraping metal.

“TELL ARMITAGE HUX THIS, THAT HE WEARS MY PATIENCE THIN. ANOTHER WRONG STEP AND I WILL DESTROY THE PATHETIC MAN HE CLINGS TO. I POSSESS THE POWER TO DO SO AT MY WILL. THIS IS MY INTENTION, AND I DO PRECISELY AS I CHOOSE.”

“I am here on no errand for Armitage Hux,” Leia said feebly, “who is loathsome beyond words to me.” She shot a glance at the door, considered fleeing before this proceeded further.

“It hardly matters what you are here for,” said Snoke, voice back to normal as suddenly as it had turned hellish. He retrieved something from his desk, an apparatus of some sort, and laid it on the surface. He unscrewed the index finger of his metal hand, replacing it with the apparatus. It was a different finger, Leia saw, this one tipped with a vibroblade claw. “Ah, wonderful. Our guest has arrived.”

The trooper returned, dragging along a short bespectacled woman with a mop of brown curls.

“Bow, wretch, before your Supreme Leader.”

The woman was shaking like a leaf, hesitated, and the door of the room banged open and shut on its own while the enormous stained-glass window behind Snoke exploded in a cloud of pulverized powder. Dubois yelped in terror, falling at once to her knees as commanded.

Snoke turned back to Leia minutely. “Our business has ended. I consider it at an end.” he said.

“Sir?” The cowering Dubois cut in, and the trooper silenced her with a swift blow to her stomach with the butt of his gun. Snoke rose from behind his desk and his seams glowed red again as he approached the collapsed form of Dubois. He held his hand up and examined his fingertips in the sunlight pouring in from the void where the window had been, the sensors embedded in each finger glowing the same shade, the blade on his index finger catching the light hideously.

Leia swallowed hard, holding back the objections that crawled up her throat. She needed to escape this room alive.

“The life of Ben Solo holds no interest for me outside of its impact on my General. In fact, the only life which holds my interest now is the life of this society, this Order.” Snoke finished, bringing his human hand down on Dubois’s shoulder heavily to hold her in place while the trooper gripped her chin and lifted it.

“Open your eyes!” the trooper barked.

“No! _NO!_ ”

“Open!”

Snoke raised his red-tipped fingers to the woman’s face, and Leia Organa fled the room.

  
  


In order to undertake anything in family life there must be either complete division between partners or loving agreement. When the relations of the couple are neither one nor the other, nothing can be started. Many families remain for years in the same place, though both heads of household are sick of it, simply because there is neither complete division nor agreement between them.

Fleeing the southern country had not ameliorated Ben and Hux’s situation. Both felt that life in Moscow was intolerable, especially in the heat of summer and particularly this terrible summer in which the streets might at any moment turn to carnage as an alien burst forth from its host to hunt other prey. There had even been attacks on citizens in their own homes. But of late there had been no agreement between Hux and Ben and so they went on staying in the city-state in their own state of limbo, expecting any day to hear that they had been granted an official marriage license or that Hux’s appeal had been denied and they would be punished. Neither of them uttered their anxiety aloud but they considered each other in the wrong and tried on every pretext to prove this to one another.

It was during this time that it became obvious to Ben that Hux had turned his attention to something or someone else. In Ben’s eyes the whole of Hux -- with all his habits and ideas and desires and physicality -- was one thing, love, and Ben felt that it ought to be entirely concentrated on him alone. That attention -- that love -- was lessening; consequently, Ben reasoned, Hux must have transferred part of his love somewhere else, and Ben was jealous. Without an object for his jealousy, he was on the lookout for it. At the slightest hint he transferred it from one object to another. He was jealous of the communiques from Hux’s military contacts, of the maintenance of their abandoned estate, of the society men Hux greeted when they walked the streets, of the imaginary Order loyalist Hux might want to marry in his stead and for whose sake he would break with Ben.

And being jealous, Ben was indignant against Hux and found grounds for indignation in everything. For everything that was difficult in their position Ben blamed Hux. The agonizing condition of suspense they endured in Moscow, the violence between the First Order and persecuted Republic figures, the tardiness and indecision of Supreme Leader Snoke on the matter of their marriage license -- Ben put it all down to Hux. If Hux had fully loved Ben he would have seen all the bitterness in him and rescued him from it. For Ben being away from his family in the country and even now isolated from them, Hux was to blame too. He could not have liked the apartment near Ben’s mother as Ben had wanted, could not part completely from the style and comforts of Arkanis that he preferred even for Ben’s sake. It was Hux’s ties to the order that prevented Ben’s family from visiting them here in the city center. And again, it was his fault Ben was forever separated from his beloved-companion, for whom Ben’s heart ached more with each passing day. He woke from nightmares of Kylo Ren growling sadly at him, a melancholy deluge of love and betrayal. Waking with a cold sweat along his spine, Ben told himself that Kylo Ren had no heart with which to love or be loved. Yes, Hux had put Ben in this awful position and the bitterness of it he could not see.

Even Hux’s moments of tenderness did not soothe Ben now, as much as he ached for them. In Hux’s caresses there was a shade of complacency and domesticity that had not been there in the beginning and which exasperated Ben. He felt that whether he wanted gentleness or passion at any given time Hux was most likely to offer the opposite, and Ben began to roughly shake off his touches.

It was dusk. Ben was alone and waiting for _him_ to come back from a First Order dinner. He walked up and down in Hux’s study, smelling the stale smoke that had settled there, hearing distantly the noise from the street. He thought over every detail of yesterday’s quarrel.

The subject of the quarrel had been Hux’s decision to hire human groundskeepers to look after Arkanis in their absence. Ben loathed the idea of using humans to perform the work of Class 2 droids. There was something appalling to him in the idea of human beings serving each other as if they were robots.

“If our liberties are made possible only by the subjugation of other people what manner of freedom can that be?” Ben had wailed, trailing Hux around this very room.

Hux had made the mistake then of purposefully taking Ben’s objection, which he knew to be sincere, as drollery: he went so far to suggest that their Class 3s had possessed every mental faculty and emotional understanding of a human and asked Ben if they had not therefore been subjugating their droids the last many years, had not in fact sent them for slaughter. Ben reddened at that remark and stormed angrily from the room.

When Hux had come to him in their room that evening they had not spoken of the quarrel, but both felt that it was not at an end, and Ben had turned his back on Hux to sleep, moving his husband’s hands away when they tried to hold him. Today Hux had not been home all day, and Ben felt so wretched in being on bad terms with him that he wanted to forget it all, to forgive him and be reconciled. Ben wanted to throw the blame on himself and to justify Hux.

_I am to blame. I’m irritable, I’m insanely jealous. I’m Dark at my core and it dims everything I touch, everything in my life. I will make it up to him, and we’ll go away -- back to Arkanis, marriage license be damned! He’s my husband without it! And away from the distractions of this city he will love me again as he did before!_

And perceiving that he had gone around the same circle from peace to exasperation that he had been round so often before, he was horrified at himself. “Can it be impossible? Can it be beyond me to control myself?” he said to himself, and began again from the beginning.

“He loves me. I love him. What more do I want? I want peace of mind. I will take the blame. There is such great darkness in me. I make it in my heart, so much that I can’t contain it and it spills forth, and that is my fault, though he brings it out in me, and so I must atone for it. Yes, now when he comes in, I will tell him I was wrong, though I was not wrong, and we will go tomorrow back to Arkanis.”

And to escape thinking any more and becoming irritable again, Ben went to their room and began to pack their things. At ten o’clock Hux came in.

“Was it nice?” Ben asked, fixing Hux with his best penitent and meek expression.

“Just as usual,” Hux answered, seeing at a glance that Ben was in one of his good moods. He was by now used to these transitions, and he was particularly glad to see it today, as he was in good humor himself, having caught up with his Order friends and heard the tales of their lives over dinner. “What’s this?” he asked, pointing to their suitcases.

“I went out for a drive,” said Ben, though he hadn’t, “And the trees outside the city bewitched me. Arkanis will be even more lovely. I feel drawn there, we’ll be happier, don’t you think? There’s nothing to keep you, is there?”

“Oh, that’s good, Ben. I’ve ached to leave this place,” Hux said. “I want to change my clothes, I’ll be back directly and we’ll talk it over. Would you put the kettle on? I’ll meet you there.”

But as Ben got to work, cringing at the crash of cup and kettle -- Kylo Ren wouldn’t have made a sound -- he felt a new wave of irritation. There was something mortifying in the way that Hux had said _that’s good, Ben_ as one says to a child when it comes around to behaving, and still more mortifying was the contrast between Ben’s apologetic demeanor and Hux’s easy confidence. Ben felt the lust for strife rising in him again and made an effort to tamp it down. He met Hux at their table as good-humoredly as he could.

“Why wait here for the license?” Ben said, pouring them each a cup of tea and wincing at spilled droplets. “It will be the same there. Right?”

“Oh, yes!” Hux said, but his glance at Ben’s face was uneasy. Hux was perhaps more attuned to the storm inside Ben than he himself was, something else that rankled him.

“We can dismiss the groundskeepers,” Ben said. “I’ll do the work. I’m strong enough.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Hux said, face patient, and this again was like he was speaking to a child. “I’ve been meaning to tell you. With the conflict heating up, I may be called back to active duty. Particularly if -- I’m sure it won’t be, but -- if our license is denied. They may need me to command our forces again, with multiple threats facing the Order. The Republic’s insurrection and now these aliens…”

“Is that it, then? It’s why we languish here and why you’ve tied up your estate so neatly? So you can play the hero when Snoke calls for you?”

Hux threw up his hands, “Ben, what is the meaning of all this?”

“There’s no meaning in it to you! You care nothing for me! You don’t understand my life.” For an instant Ben had a clear vision of what he was doing and was horrified at how he had fallen away from his resolution to keep peace between them. But he could not restrain himself, could not keep himself from proving to his husband that he was wrong, could not give way to him. “How is it,” Ben said, “That you cannot be honest with me, that you made a great show of how much my wanting to be near my family hurt you, and this whole time you also waited orders in this city?”

“I don’t lie to you, Ben,” Hux said slowly, restraining his rising anger. “It’s a pity you can’t respect--”

“Respect was invented to cover the void where love should be, and if you don’t love me anymore, it would be better to say so!”

“This is unbearable!” cried Hux, getting up from his chair, stopping short, facing Ben. He said deliberately. “What do you try my patience for? It has limits.”

“What do you mean by that?” Ben said, looking with terror at the undisguised contempt in Hux’s face, the mean glint in those green eyes.

“I mean to say…” Hux began, and then checked himself. “Ben, what is it that you want of me?”

“What can I want? I want love, and there is none!” Ben turned toward the door.

“Stop! _Stop!_ ” said Hux, and held him by his arm, grip tight, stronger than his frame betrayed. “Ben, how could I love you any more? We are here aren’t we, for you! In this awful city. I’d have moved your whole family out to Arkanis too, if that is what you asked, though your mother loathes me! _Why can’t you see that everything I do is to keep you alive and happy!_ ”

“You reproach me with having sacrificed everything for me. You’re worse than dishonest. You’re heartless!”

Hux let go of Ben’s arm. “You drive me to distraction,” he hissed.

“He hates me, that’s clear,” Ben said, speaking in exactly the warm and confidential tone he once used with Kylo Ren. Hux listened in silence, eyes locked on Ben’s while Ben backed with faltering steps out of the room. “He’s hated me for a long time, only I couldn’t bear to see it. He loves himself and he loves this new society under his Order, that’s even clearer.” Ben said in addition, no longer caring that he was speaking aloud. “I want love, and I want robots, and both are gone.” He knew what Kylo Ren would do: he would glow a deep maroon with sympathy, reflecting Ben’s emotions back to him, would put a reassuring hand on his shoulder and lend him consolation and calm.

But Kylo Ren was gone.

In the bedchamber, Ben threw the lock and slumped into the armchair. Thoughts came into his head of where he could go now, whether home to his mother or perhaps to Rey, and of what _he_ was doing now alone in the dining room or his study. Whether this was the final quarrel or whether reconciliation was still possible. And deeper, at the bottom of his heart, an obscure idea rising to the surface. _Why am I alive?_ He cried, and knew at once what was in his soul. Death alone would solve all.

“To die,” Ben said aloud. It would save Hux the embarrassment of having married the enemy’s son, and save his family the pain of caring for him. “And he will feel remorse, will love me. Will suffer on my account.” With the trace of a smile Ben played with the ring on his left hand, sliding it off and on.

He heard pounding at the door, but, as though absorbed by his ring, did not turn toward it. _Let him knock. Let him worry._ Vividly he pictured from different sides Hux’s feelings after his death.

The next knock, however, was not from the door but the windowpane. It shattered and an Honored Guest burst into the chamber and leapt across the room toward him, shrieking horribly, its dozens of rotten yellow eyes fixed on him. Ben rolled from the chair and scrambled back, and the beast was upon him.

It slashed at him with its claws, lunged for his throat with its sharp teeth. He screamed Hux’s name, clawed back at the thing. A drip of the alien’s saliva landed on his clavicle and burned like boiling tea.

Why fight? Just a moment ago he had been ready to die, and here was a quick death. But then the beast would go for Hux. Ben flung the alien off him, and jumped up onto the armchair. He grabbed the saber Rey and Luke had gifted him from its stand on the dresser and brandished it, the blue glow lighting the room. Multitudinous yellow eyes blinked off-sync up at him, and the alien released another stream of saliva which pooled on the floor and left a heat-lightened stain on it. He heard Hux scream “ _Ben!_ ” through the door, followed by the reverberant thud of the man’s shoulder against it.

The creature was up and in motion, and Ben swung down at it. His first swing took off an arm, the second cleaved its head and half its green-gray torso in two. Cobalt blood flooded the floor. The door burst open and Hux rushed in, blaster drawn.

“I’m alright,” Ben told him, and deactivated the saber. “I’ve got a burn on my chest, that’s all. It won’t trouble me.” And then, looking back toward the corpse and broken window, “We’ll need to call troopers to dispose of it. We can stay in the study tonight?”

“...Yes,” Hux said at length, holstering his blaster on his thigh. “Ben...we don’t have to go, if you don’t want to.”

His statement in the face of an alien attack in their home was ludicrous, and Ben laughed shrilly once before dissolving into tears. “No...no, we’ll leave in the morning.”

Hux drew him into his arms and walked him down the hall, pausing to shut the door on the monstrous scene inside, the whole way speaking softly. He begged Ben to be calm, and declared that he had never ceased, would never cease to love him; he loved Ben more than ever.

“Why distress yourself and me so?” Hux said to him as they settled wearily onto the couch in the study. There was tenderness now in his face and tears in his voice, Ben felt them wet on his hand when Hux kissed his fingers. Ben’s despairing jealousy waned, replaced by an echoing sweetness.

He put his arms around Hux and covered him with kisses too. His head, his neck, his hands. Hux’s skin was warm under his mouth, salty with sweat from their argument, from his exertion in breaking open the door. Ben tugged at his shirt, unbuttoning it to get at more skin, kissing his husband’s chest, nipping at his collarbone and neck. He felt Hux’s hands going for his own shirt, working it open -- he knew every detail of these hands even in the dark: fine bones, nails cut to the quick and filed smooth, tendons standing out on the backs of his palms, blue veins visible in his wrists, one tiny freckle on the back of his left hand near his thumb and another on the back of his right wrist, golden hair on his forearms peeking out from his shirtsleeves. Ben could see every inch of Hux like a photograph behind his eyelids when he called the images forth. His own life was a blur, a series of vague half-pictures tied to feelings that swallowed him up, but Hux…. _He is clearer to me than I am. He is more myself than I am._

There was desperation in their lovemaking tonight. They struggled on the small couch, shedding clothes and tossing them aside to get at each other more fully. Neither had brought their lubricant in from the bedroom and so they contented themselves with the other’s hands and mouth caressing them, an echo across time of their first coupling. And here in the quiet dark there were no looks to decipher when Hux cried Ben’s name, there was only his hand fisted in Ben’s hair and his body shuddering under Ben’s ministrations, and his voice, soft and loving and louder than Ben’s treacherous mind.

  
  


Ben set eagerly to work in the morning preparing for their departure, not taking time to repair the wrecked bedroom. Hux had dressed early and gone out to meet with a fellow officer about the alien attack.

When he returned he was white in the face and holding a missive from the Order.

“What’s the matter?” Ben asked him, bringing their bags to the front door. He looked at the slip of holofilm curiously -- was this the technology that they meant to replace comms units with? It seemed terribly inefficient. “Who’s that from?”

“When I met with Admiral Pryde about our encounter he gave me this,” Hux said, looking at the holofilm in his hand as if it might bite him. “Our license has been denied on account of your parentage.”

“Give it to me,” Ben said, stepping forward.

Hux pulled it away.

“Hux, why hide it? Do you think it will affect me? You’re my husband no matter what it says.”

“That’s not the worst of it. Ben, your family has been placed on the Order’s list of public enemies.” Hux handed the film over, face drawn. “I’m so sorry. I argued, but it’s not my decision to make.”

Ben took the holofilm in shaking hands and read it without absorbing the words. At the bottom was a picture taken at Rey’s birthday. Ben’s face was blacked out, but the rest smiled up at him. His mother and father, Luke and Rey. All wanted for treason.

Hux spoke swiftly, decisively, “The Order knows of our plan to leave the city for Arkanis, I told them before...before _this_. I believe they mean to leave us alone for now, but your family….You must warn them. We cannot go south anymore. I’m...I’m afraid for you. We’ll go north, to my family home in Arduinna, and make our next move from there. I’ll go to the grav station alone this morning, and if I am accosted I will return here and wait for you. Follow me after you’ve convinced your family to leave. Do not travel with them. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” said Ben. “Yes, I’ll go at once.” He pulled Hux in to kiss him. “Be careful.”

Hux caressed Ben’s face, “It’s you I’m worried about. I love you, Ben. I’ll see you soon.” Ben’s heart fluttered at the words, at the warmth in Hux’s eyes, and he felt himself a fool for letting his own darkness rile him into thinking less of Hux’s affections.

Hux grabbed his bag and turned, casting one last long look over his shoulder. His pale green eyes gleamed between rows of copper lashes, though with what, Ben still couldn’t decide. In all their years together Ben had never fully seen what it was in Hux’s nature that so overflowed him as to show in the flash of his eyes against his will. For a moment as they looked at each other on the cusp of this separation, Ben thought the shroud was lifting. Then Hux said again, softly, “I love you.” and was gone.

  
  


As he maneuvered their speeder out of its alley parking spot, Ben stopped and cut the power in front of the apartment. Admiral Pryde waited there, watching him with cold blue eyes.

“Mr. Solo,” Pryde greeted him. “Would you be so kind as to remind me where the alien’s remains are located? I should hate to disturb your things unnecessarily in retrieving it.”

“Bedroom, second level. Can’t miss the ugly thing,” Ben said, keeping his tone light.

“Hux fended it off, then? How very lucky for you your husband was home.”

“I’m a lucky man.” Let this creep think Hux had split the beast almost in two with his hot-whip, it might dampen Pryde’s enthusiasm in nipping at Hux’s heels.

“May I inquire as to where you are going, Mr. Solo?”

Ben patted the steering wheel of the speeder. “Oh, just taking one last drive in this model. It’s not going on the metro south with me, you know?”

“Very good. Long live the Supreme Leader.”

Ben made himself say the words back, though they tasted like acid. Like alien spit.

He took backstreets on his way out of the city center, making extra turns just in case. By the time he pulled up in front of his parents’ new apartment his heart was hammering sickeningly. The new place was small and old, dismal. Ben wished suddenly that he could see their old apartment once more, and dismissed the feeling with a pang.

The door was open, Han dragging two suitcases out of it and down the stoop to a waiting cab. Ben ran up and dismissed the driver before turning to his father. Han stopped his words in his throat with a tight bear hug. Tears sprang to Ben’s eyes, rolling down his face. His frame shook.

“Dad,” He said.

“I know,” Han replied.

Leia came down the stairs next, dressed casually, long hair braided down in a way Ben had not seen it since he was small. She stopped short at the sight of him as though she were seeing a ghost.

“Ben,” she breathed. And then crossed the distance to join them. Ben wrapped her up in their hug too, towering over both his parents. Leia pulled back first, as she always had, eyes sharp. Ready to deal with everything. “We’re leaving the planet.”

“Now?”

“Now. Luke has already taken Rey’s family to the launching station. We’re meeting them there, taking the Falcon out of here. We’re stopping on the moon to pick up a medical droid for Rey and then we’re exiting the system for--”

“Stop,” Ben snapped. “Don’t tell me where.”

The light that Ben’s presence had produced in his mother’s face went out. “Ben, please.” she said softly.

“I can’t. Is Rey hurt?”

“She’s pregnant.” Han said.

Ben flinched. He had missed so terribly much of his family’s lives, and now he would never see them again. For their protection, he must never see them again.

Leia stared up at him beseechingly. “Snoke means to destroy you. I met with him and he told me to my face that he would kill you. He’s been modified beyond belief and…I saw him preparing to execute a journalist in his office, he _unscrewed one of his fingers and replaced it with a knife_. Ben, there’s nothing for you here.”

“There’s Hux.”

“There’s _nothing for you with him!_ ” Leia cried. “ _With that -- that pasty little fascist._ ”

Han put a hand on her shoulder and she turned away from Ben, into Han’s chest. Han spoke, voice even. Compensating for Leia. “He _is_ pasty. Skinny too. Ben, I don’t pretend to know what’s in his heart. I don’t think I know what’s in yours, either. Not anymore.”

“Hux sent me to warn you,” Ben said. “Take his speeder. It’s faster than any cab and it has security clearance for any gate. You’ll get to the station without trouble.”

“And you two? What happens to you?” Han inquired.

Ben came up short. Arduinna wasn’t an answer, not in the long term. Not with the Supreme Leader’s influence spreading steadily over the globe. “I don’t know.”

“Whose side are you on? Do you know that?”

“No.”

“Does your husband know any more than you do? Do either of you have a plan?” Leia asked bitterly.

“I don’t know.”

“He gets that from you,” Leia hissed at Han.

“Do you still love the bastard?” Han asked.

“I do.” Ben said, then “That might be the only thing I know.”

“Then go get him and bring him home.”

“Home is gone.” _It’s leaving with you._ This was no time to leave words unsaid. “You’ll be gone.”

“We will,” Han agreed. “But what we’re standing for, what we’re fighting for. That’s everywhere. And if you look for us, you’ll find us, kid.”

Ben handed over the ignition to the speeder, and picked up his parents bags. Once they were loaded up and gliding out of sight, Ben allowed himself to sit on the grimy stairs outside the empty shell of his family’s last Earthly residence and bawl. He cried unselfconsciously, like a frightened overgrown child, sobs wracking his whole body, until he was wrung dry.

Without a speeder and unwilling to risk a cab, he walked home. At the very least, the troopers and Admiral Pryde were done with the alien when he returned. Ben could not stomach the idea of speaking to that man again now. He wondered if the Admiral had enjoyed ransacking Hux’s apartment, looking for anything untoward to show the Supreme Leader.

Ben let himself in and jolted at the sight of another human in his home. _Who’s that?_ He thought, looking at the flushed face with its dark and glittering eyes, frightened posture. He gazed at them a moment before he realized. _It’s me._ It was only the looking glass in the hall. _I’m going out of my mind_ , he thought, and went into his bedroom…

Where he met the hulking figure of Kylo Ren. The android, clad as ever in its black cloak, held its hands out to its master and spoke.

“Ben,” said the robot in its familiar low growl. “You must be calm now and listen.”

“Kylo,” said Ben, bringing a hand to his face in shock. “You’re back!”

“In a way,” said Kylo Ren. “The android you knew and loved was a Class Three. Though I resemble that model in many ways, I am a Class Nine.”

“A Class Nine...but…”

“Ben, there is not much time. I must explain what comes next.”

Ben wondered if this conversation was real, but if this was a dream he did not want it to end. Oh, how he had missed his beloved-companion.

“In the future,” the droid began, “The changes now convulsing society will continue. Supreme Leader Snoke will complete his control over the planet and then endeavor to extend it to the galaxy. All technologies, all machines, and all power will be consolidated in the cruel hands of the First Order, and all droids loyal to humanity on Earth will be destroyed, leaving humans weak to the whims of Order machines and modified men.”

“They can’t…” Ben interjected, but Kylo motioned for him to be silent.

“Hope will survive, in the form of the Resistance. Rey will lead them. With the aid of the scattered old Republic they will in secrecy keep the fires of humanity bright and the alliance between humans and droids alive. There will be experiments and great breakthroughs in robotics, in armaments, in transportation. They will even _travel through time._ ”

Ben ran his hands through his hair, disheveling his dark curls, trying to take comfort in his physicality during this emotional upheaval.

“Eventually,” said Kylo, “Your brave cousin will rely upon this new technology to stop Supreme Leader Snoke before his reign begins. The Resistance’s plan rests upon destroying the Mechanism, an invention of the First Order which resulted in their swift subjugation of the galaxy.”

“Mechanism...what…”

“It’s a highly sophisticated machine, an android which appears human to all those it encounters.”

“That cannot be,” Ben said, horrified.

“It can. It exists now, and it will see to the military success of the Order when it is called upon by the Supreme Leader. He will call, and it will answer and bring the galaxy to heel for him.”

Ben cried out at once, held his hands up in front of him, “Kylo Ren, stop,” he said breathlessly. “I want you to stop. I command you to stop!”

The droid spoke louder with its powerful voice, “General Armitage Hux of the First Order is no more human than I am. He is a machine-man of an entirely new kind, the Android Class Twelve. A weapon.”

Ben sank down against the wall, trembling. None of the griefs of his life matched this suffering. He grasped at the loose ends of his thoughts. “Why not kill Snoke directly, why must...why must it be my husband?”

“Because Ben, the flow of time is exceedingly resistant to change. We’ve only got one chance, and Snoke is heavily guarded. But the Mechanism is vulnerable within the intimacy of its home. It is vulnerable to you.” Kylo Ren approached, resting a heavy hand on Ben’s shoulder just as Ben had ached for in the droid’s absence. “Go to it and destroy it with your own hands. You are the only one who can.”

Ben shoved the droid from him and made for the door.

A fine rain was falling, misting the streets as Ben took them. He raced down avenues and alleys, boots skidding through puddles. He skirted crowds, passed posters bearing the non-face of Snoke. Hearing metal footsteps behind him. Kylo Ren, his shadow, his twin, himself hot on his own heels – constructed to mirror Ben out of, he now knew, the same mechanisms whirring away inside of Hux.

_How can I do what he says?_ Ben thought, _to slay my husband with my own hands, in cold blood – no matter what kind of monster he is or may become! I am selfish and Dark, crueler than I mean to be, but I am not a murderer! But, if what Kylo says is true,_ and Ben knew it was in the deepest pit of his heart, _then my husband cannot be murdered. He is no person at all._

The buildings flew by in a blur. Ben’s muscles ached. He ran beside a transport and with a last burst of strength grabbed on to the sideboard and watched Kylo Ren shrink behind him. As the streets rolled by under the transport, Ben tried to organize his feverish mind into something that made sense. He longed for the aid of his Class 3, though his stomach tightened now at the thought of the familiar droid. The one thing he did know was that, despite what he now knew of the true nature of his husband, he yet loved Armitage Hux.

_Can’t I live without him?_ He left the question unanswered, even in his own mind, and fell to reading the signs of shops. Offices, dental, bakeries. Florist. Pale green fern fronds flanking bouquets in the window. Oh, it seemed so long, long, long ago now. Yet this one memory was clear as a hologram. Clearer. _Was that really us, with red faces, red hands, the ferns swaying around us as he laid me down? When he was a creature of flesh and spirit, because he must have been. Not an android with a mind of spinning metal. What I had then is out of reach now forever._

Ben snapped back to the present as Kylo Ren dashed out from an alley and hurled itself at him, knocking him from the transport and into the street. They clawed at each other, rainwater seeping into Ben’s clothes and the droid’s cloak. “You are blessed, Ben!” Kylo said in its grating metal voice. “Unlike us, so few humans have purpose. But you have been given one. A simple mission, easy for someone in your position. Accept it. Accept your destiny.”

Ben wrenched himself free, knowing his arms would bruise where Kylo had held them. A few onlookers watched them with incredulous amusement; any conflict between a person and a droid had been unusual before, and now robots themselves were nearly extinct. The novelty wore off as man and droid sat silent on the walk, eyeing each other. Across the way two girls laughed merrily as they walked hand in hand. Ben wondered what they could laugh and smile at. _Love, probably. They don’t know how evil it is. I’m losing my everything and not getting him back. I will go and kill him, what point to resist? Yes, I will do it…Yes, I am losing everything… How loathsome I am to myself._ “I will do it,” he said woodenly. “Give me your robe.” The droid did so. “Now leave me.” Kylo Ren seemed almost to refuse, not moving for several moments. But when Ben met the droid’s optical sensor, it wordlessly stood and walked away.

Ben tried to shake Kylo’s words from his head as he slowly made the trek home, the hooded robe keeping the worst of the drizzle from him, but they sat in his head like a sullen cat, disinclined to budge. What was the last thing he’d ever thought so clearly on his own? He scowled at a cheery family passing by, thinking, _It’s useless what you’re doing. You seek happiness as I did. All happiness will be drowned in the end. I could leave. I could leave him and be glad for his freedom._ Ben suddenly felt he saw the truth in such piercing light that he stopped to lean against a wall.

_We walked toward each other on the paths of our lives, and we met, and we loved, I thought we loved…but I was alone. I am human and he is machine. And loving me as a kind and attentive husband from duty, from programming, is worse than if he’d never loved me at all. If I cannot have his love, his passion, then I will kill this machine that threatens the ones in my life who do love me. And if by doing so I will complete this destiny that Kylo Ren says is mine, then that is how it is. When Hux took my hand and kissed me he did not love me, he has never loved me, and where love ends hate begins. So let it be hate._

“A ticket to Arduinna?”

Ben realized he had halted his progress outside the station. It was only by great effort that he understood the question the ticketing droid asked him. It was dizzying to see droids still at work. When would even these be replaced by humans?

“Yes,” he said. The droid informed him that the Grav would arrive in a few minutes, and Ben took the stairs two at a time. Waiting for the Grav, he labored over his choice – to ride the line to Arduinna and complete this terrible errand, or to disappear into anonymity somewhere along the line. To save his family, or his husband.

He toyed with the prospect of going to Hux, explaining what Kylo Ren had said, begging him to leave the Order and begin anew in some distant world with Ben’s family. They could hijack a ship, Han had taught him that much. Scour the galaxy, follow the Falcon’s path. Hope and despair in equal measure poisoned the wounds in his tortured heart. As he sat on the bench, Ben watched people come and go and they were all hateful to him. He thought of how he would find Hux in this family home, yet unseen. In his mind it was Arkanis. He pictured Hux reading in the sunroom perhaps, or outside in the garden. Framed by fern fronds, a bouquet of orange and white with steel innards, not understanding Ben’s suffering. He thought of how miserably he loved and hated Hux, and how miserably his own heart was beating.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Today's episode, also known as Part 2 of Ben forgetting mirrors exist. Someone get this boy an anxiety med. Next week's the end. ( : Stay tuned!


	6. THE FIRST FUTURE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW end notes

A tear rolled down Kylo’s cheek, and still he waited. Strangers passed, silent or noisy, and all of them were hideous, but the smiling ones most of all. A woman asked if she could sit next to him and he gave her no answer, lost in his thoughts.

_ And what if I did entreat him to choose me? Hux can never love me, he was never capable of loving me and never did, and once he understands what I must do, he will sever our connection and I will be without him and without Rey and my parents, when he completes his function. I cannot picture a life that would not be a misery, no matter the choice I make. My heart has been subsumed by a machine with a deadly purpose. Why not put the light out when there’s nothing more to look at, when it sickens me to look at all? But how? _

He had insisted to himself that he could not kill, but he felt the necessary cruelty inside himself even now, as he cursed the faces of his own kind and longed for the face of an android before him. As long as he lived this mission would be lurking inside him, bidding him to destroy Hux.  _ There will be a murder, if not his then mine. No path is bloodless, for ripping the gears from my lover’s head would also rip my heart from my chest. No…no. _

Ben stood as the Grav approached, taking halting heavy steps forward.  _ This pain is tearing me apart. I know what I have to do. I must find the strength to do it. There, in the very middle… I will end this hateful thing I have become. Even now I hope it punishes him for what he is. _ A feeling of great calm came over Ben as he tipped forward onto the tracks. At exactly the point of no return, as the Grav rattled horribly toward him, he was overcome with icy panic.  _ What am I doing? _ He thought, but then the Grav struck him, huge and merciless, rolling him over.

He tasted blood and bile, smelled smoke, felt all and then less. The sorrow and the evil flared bright in his mind, lit up all that had been in darkness, flickered, and then were quenched forever.

Kylo Ren watched silently through the holo-panels above, and raised his metal hand in just the way that Snoke had in his office, when the broken teacup had come back together. His plates glowed an ominous red, summoning the godsmouth. It dropped Ben’s body in the same place, the magnet bed of the Moscow-Arduinna Grav, some years earlier. At the moment his body emerged, the sky ricocheted with a strange crack of thunder. It echoed across the infinities of that moment in time, and was noted with apprehension by the travelers in the station. Among them General Hux of the First Order, arrived in the capitol to bury his father, and Ben Solo, who was at the station to meet his cousin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Major character death


	7. THE SECOND FUTURE

A tear rolled down his cheek, and still he waited. Strangers passed, silent or noisy, and all of them were hideous, but the smiling ones most of all. A woman asked if she could sit next to him and he gave her no answer, lost in his thoughts. She sat anyway.

_And what if I did entreat him to choose me? Every moment that I searched him for love and thought I found it did I deceive myself? Hux looked into my eyes and professed his love a thousand times over, and was it just a means to an end? Stars help me, I don’t think so. I am a fool to believe that he was and is capable of loving me, but I believe it. My heart has been subsumed by a machine with a deadly purpose. Stars help me. Stars help me._

He had insisted to himself that he could not kill, but he felt the necessary cruelty inside himself even now, as he cursed the faces of his own kind and longed for the face of an android before him. _There would be a murder if I carry on this path, if not his then mine. No end would be bloodless, for ripping the gears from my lover’s head would also rip my heart from my chest._

In his turmoil, Ben ran his hands over his face. The dark-haired woman sitting next to him shifted, and he glanced at her. She reminded him of the Vox Fourteen, though he couldn’t place why. He turned away with a shiver, hearing Lando Calrissian’s words spoken in Saba’s voice, ‘his defiance will shake the stars.’ _I must make a new path. I cannot be without him and I cannot be without Rey and my parents, so I will deter him from his function._

Ben stood as the Grav approached, taking halting heavy steps forward. The sight of the magnetic tracks sickened him, dread pulsing along his spine. _This pain is tearing me apart. I must find the strength to end this hateful thing I have become and start again. I accept that I love him for what he is._

For only a moment as the grav-metro rolled into the station, Ben’s heart leapt into his throat. There was a shadow on the tracks, a man. Before he could scream, the form dissolved into nothing. Only a shadow after all. The Grav docked and Ben entered the metro car in front of him, hands trembling. It only occurred to Ben as he sat down that he’d left his bag in the apartment. He had even left the door standing open in his haste to get away from Kylo Ren. At least Hux had the foresight to pack Ben’s saber in his own bag so that Pryde couldn't confiscate it in his search of the house.

When the grav-metro docked in Arduinna, the last stop on the line, Hux was waiting in the station. He stood in front of the doors to the third carriage, seeming a ghost in the wane light in his white shirt, and when they opened and Ben stepped out, he looked as though he’d had the breath knocked out of him.

“Ben,” he said.

Ben picked him up and crushed Hux’s frame to his chest. Hux hooked his legs around Ben and clasped his face in his hands, tilting down to kiss him deeply. The cars of the Grav had been nearly empty by this stop, and the people left in them were haggard and tired. They went on their way without a glance in the couple’s direction, and so Ben walked forward as he was, holding Hux against one of the station’s stone support columns, and went on kissing him until he had to come up for air.

“Ben,” Hux said again, and his face was flushed, and his body was warm and softer than any android should be, and there were freckles on his face from the summer sun that would fade in winter. His hands were caressing Ben’s jaw, the hands Ben knew by heart. “I was so worried,” Hux’s voice cracked, and it was all Ben could do not to lean in again.

“I’m here,” Ben said instead. “I’m here.” And the weight of dread in his spine lifted at last.

“They added your name to the list,” Hux said rapidly, eyes watering, “After I arrived I saw it and -- where’s your bag?”

“I left it in the house. I couldn’t go back for it.”

“Was it Pryde? Did they try to take you--”

“No. It’s a lot to explain. I saw Pryde, but it must have been before my name was added. I didn’t know... I’m not surprised. Mom said that she met with Snoke. She wanted me to go with her. She said that he wants to destroy me. Hux, I won’t let anything happen to you, I won’t--”

“You utter imbecile,” Hux choked out, kissing Ben’s forehead, his cheek, the corner of his mouth. Ben twisted, trying to give him a full kiss, and Hux tipped his head up to keep talking. “It’s you he wants and it’s my fault, I’ve doomed you by loving you.”

“You don’t love me.”

“Ben, now, really?”

“I mean you shouldn’t.”

“Yes, that’s what I--”

“No, Hux. Never mind. We should talk about this elsewhere.”

“Right. Yes. Put me down.”

They walked hand-in-hand from the station to the sea wall. For all the confiscation of robots had changed the rest of the country, Ben thought with a strange sort of reverence that it wouldn’t change this place, so long as the climate emitters were left untouched, and why would Snoke want to lose a northern seaport? The buildings and the sea wall itself were masoned stone, not even a durasteel fixture or tiny holo-panel in sight. Hux had told him previously that it rained here in all seasons but every day in the summer, and today held true to form. There was a light drizzle out of the gray sky, mixing with sea spray in the breeze. They were both damp by the time they descended to a docked sea-skimmer bobbing along the dark water.

They skimmed up the coast, away from the city, docking in isolation. The shore was rocky here, punctuated with patches of tall grass and scrub brush. The Huxes ancestral home was very unlike Arkanis Academy. It was a stone house from another age, two stories tall with an observation tower on one side. Well-preserved, but ancient and small.

Ben trotted to keep up with Hux, who seemed drawn to the place like a magnet. Hux wrenched open the front door. It was real wood, Ben noted in awe. The window frames were wood as well, every scrap of the place that wasn’t stone or iron painted a fading teal. This place, too, seemed untouched by the age of machines. “You grew up here?” Ben asked. His voice echoed in the stone halls. The place smelled dry, which was a relief.

“Until the Academy,” Hux answered. He bustled around, pulling drawers open, looking for something. “We can’t stay long. They’ll check here, of course. There’s a launching station out back, with a light ship. I had Phasma prepare it for me. For us.”

“We’re running?”

“Well we can’t bloody well stay, can we?”

“Hux.”

Hux turned to face him. Ben started again. “I mean, _you’re_ running? From the Order?”

“Do you think so little of yourself?” Hux asked him. Not cruelly. It was earnest, which perhaps worsened the blow.

“It’s not about me.”

“ _Of course it is about you, Ben_ . My _whole life_ is about you if you hadn’t _noticed_ . I don’t even --” Hux stopped, ran his hands over his face and back through his hair, then fixed Ben with a look that said Ben was being supremely obtuse, and continued, “I don’t even want to go back to my ship. I do miss it but, I don’t want it anymore. All else in my life pales in comparison to you. You’re _all_ I want. How is that still so hard for you to understand?”

“My _question_ wasn’t about me. Hux, the Order is your function. It doesn’t make any sense for you to just abandon it.”

“My ‘function’? Ben, _you_ are not making any sense. For the life of me I don’t know why I still expect any different, you strange creature. We’re wasting time.” Hux turned as if to keep ransacking his own home, and Ben stepped forward and grabbed his arm. The flesh was hot in his grasp. It had the right give as Ben squeezed it, but the strength with which Hux resisted Ben’s attempt to pull him close didn’t belong to any man his size.

The terrible reality was dawning on Ben. “You don’t know,” he said gravely. “Stars above, you don’t know. That’s how you’re so convincing.”

Hux looked up at him, face a mask of exasperated confusion: mouth set in that tight, closed grimace he was prone to when he was upset, eyebrows drawn, green eyes sapped of their richness in the muted, rainy light. “Tell me what you’re on about, you ridiculous man,” Hux said, but his voice was hushed, his face paler than its natural state. He was afraid. Afraid just as Ben had been afraid when Kylo Ren divulged to him the wicked truth.

“Hux, you are an android Class Twelve known as the Mechanism, built to serve the First Order.”

Hux looked at him, eyes going wide with abject horror. They stood, staring at each other, Ben’s hand clasped around Hux’s skinny arm. It began to rain in earnest again, water drumming on the roof and windows. Hux coughed out a shaky breath. “Ben,” he breathed, his voice still quiet. “Oh God… You’ve gone mad.”

“Hux, no. Listen to me, Kylo Ren was in the apartment when I went back.”

“Your Class 3?”

“Yes but no. It was Kylo Ren, but he was a Class Nine, from the future. He was with the Resistance and --”

“The bloody _fucking_ Resistance, I should have guessed!” Hux’s voice was loud now, angry. “No, enough, I won’t hear any more of it.”

“Hux, you aren’t human, you--”

“ _THAT’S ENOUGH!_ ”

“--need to listen to me.”

Hux tore his arm out of Ben’s grip and stalked heavily up the stairs, leaving Ben in the entryway. He thundered back down only ten minutes later, looking satisfied, his bag slung over his shoulder and a black durasteel pyramid clutched in one palm. “Cloaking device,” he explained. “My father used it routinely, of course he’d lock it up under his bed. Should’ve checked there first. Those climate-controlled trunks are actually marvelous, his clothes were still in good condition. I packed some of them for you, I think they’ll fit. We need to leave this planet. Ben, are you listening to me?” Hux held up the pyramid, and addressed Ben in that hateful tone of voice again, the one that sounded like he was speaking to a child. “Cloaking device from my father. Perhaps you’re familiar with the concept? Of my human father?”

Ben felt that old lust rising in him like a black tide, the need to show Hux that he was wrong and Ben was right. “Damn it, Hux, I’ll prove it to you.”

Hux fixed him with a cold look, the look Ben hated. Ben wanted to scratch it off his face, and clenched his fists to dispel the urge. “How?”

Admittedly he had not thought that far.

Ben approached Hux, who gamely set down his bag and the pyramid and stood, waiting. Ben took Hux’s hands in his, Hux’s palms against his palms, and ran his thumbs over them. He knew them better than his own: fine bones, nails cut to the quick and filed smooth, tendons standing out on the backs of his palms, blue veins visible in his wrists, one tiny freckle on the back of his left hand near his thumb and another on the back of his right wrist, golden hair on his forearms. Ben let Hux’s right hand go, cupping the left in both of his tenderly for a moment. He touched each of Hux’s fingers lightly from root to tip, and then looked into his eyes.

“You want me to prove it?”

Hux looked back, unblinking. “If you must.”

Ben took hold of Hux’s left little finger, closed his eyes, and snapped it unceremoniously from the hand. It required no more effort than the maneuvers of droid repairs in his old shop had. Hux’s hand went slack and slid out of his, and then Ben heard the sickly smack of Hux falling backward into the stone wall behind him. He opened his eyes.

There was no blood pulsing hotly over the bare stone floor. The end of the disembodied finger in his hand flickered with pale blue light. The reaction was mirrored in Hux’s hand, where a piece of silver bone gleamed, sticking out of the palm where his finger had been anchored.

“ _Fuck_ , Ben that _fucking hurt_ ,” was the first thing he said.

“I’m sorry,” Ben felt at once, familiarly, that he had erred in succumbing to his irritations with Hux. He had not meant to cause his husband pain. “It doesn’t now?”

“No. It stopped.”

“Sensors must have shut down.” Ben held up Hux’s missing finger. “I can reattach it.”

The full reality of his position hit Hux as he stared at the shard of metal protruding from his hand, shining blue in the flickering light, and the easy confidence with which he had lived his entire life was ripped away just as his finger had been. He saw at once how the parade of faces in his memory that had ever looked upon him with disgust -- his own father, Snoke, Tsarevna Leia, Admiral Pryde -- could loathe him so utterly, for who could help hating such a miserable monstrosity? They had seen it somehow, had seen his unnatural soul. _Some are born from the bodies of their mothers and some pieced together from their mothers' minds, but man creates all his offspring to be miserable,_ Hux thought. _My life, my memories...all of them a deception. What am I to do with the truth? The cruelty of it…._

Hux looked up at Ben, and saw that Ben was attuned and sympathetic to his own shock, though he could not possibly understand. “You called me Mechanism,” Hux started feebly, his voice returning to full strength and picking up speed as he continued. “And so long as I live so does this possibility, the possibility of the future the Resistance fears. That is so, yes? You say that my function is the First Order. The organization which has condemned you and the ones you love. Therefore my function is to kill you, to destroy your family, to do evil?”

“Hux…” Ben dropped to his knees, crawled to his husband and drew him into an awkwardly positioned embrace.

“You come to me now?” Hux said, voice still growing louder, shrill, enraged. “Knowing _this?_ _How dare you?_ ” He struggled against Ben ineffectively, not pushing with his full strength, pulling his hands away as soon as they brushed Ben’s chest. Afraid of himself. “ _How DARE you?!_ ”

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, if I could spare you this….”

“You are _everything_ to me,” Hux spat, “And you come to me now knowing I’ve been built to destroy you, the only thing in this galaxy that I _love_.”

“Androids don’t love. You shouldn’t love me but you _do_ , and I deserve death a thousand times over for every moment I doubted it,” Ben said, gripping Hux’s face to force him to look into his eyes. “You are not what you were built to be, any more than I am what I was born to be.”

This at last seemed to extinguish the anger pouring off of Hux. He laughed miserably. “Disappointments, then, the both of us. If my purpose is against all that lies in my heart, or whatever passes for it--”

“Kyber crystal, probably.”

Hux shuddered. “Don’t. If my purpose is against what I love, then this is why I am capable of reason. To escape.”

As if on cue, there came the telltale hum of an approaching skimmer by the dock. The Order had arrived, this enemy of theirs which they now held in common with Ben’s family, not made into their foe on the same pure moral grounds but in the selfish pursuit of their individual freedoms to love each other.

Ben shuffled back and pulled Hux up to standing with him. Hux took his finger and put it into his breast pocket for safekeeping, feeling as if he had walked into a strange and fluctuating dream and at any moment might wake, except for the solidness of the floor under his feet, and the heat of Ben by his side. “We’re discussing this later,” he said, patting his pocket.

“I’m sorry,” Ben said again.

Ben scarcely let go of him on the way to the light ship Phasma had procured, always with a hand on his arm or the small of his back. Hux interfaced the cloaking device with the ship’s computer while Ben familiarized himself with the controls, waving away Hux’s offer to pilot. They communicated in looks and signs until they broke atmo, occupied by the frantic business of their escape.

Once space stretched on in front of them, blackness dotted with stars reaching into infinity, Hux spoke. “I know it's infinite, but I cannot see that it is no matter how much I strain my eyes.”

“Are you feeling alright?” Ben asked him, teasing lightly.

Hux nudged him from the copilot’s chair. “That’s how we must think of our future now. We cannot see it, but we know it’s there to take.”

Ben turned briefly to kiss him, the expression on his face and decisiveness of his motion more confident than Hux had ever seen him before. “In the event that you go on feeling existential for too terribly long,” Ben said, “You must swear to tell me.”

Hux gazed at Ben, dizzy at this sudden role-reversal, and thought, _Can this be my new purpose? Do I need one? The truth has not enlightened me. Changed me, certainly, but I don’t know how. Perhaps I never will._

Aloud, he said, Oh, “I think I shall go on in much the same way. Losing my temper, being vexed, scolding you for my own terror and being sorry for it. And loving you beyond all reason. I will go on doing that unto whatever end awaits us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end! Thanks for reading.

**Author's Note:**

> As mentioned in the summary, this work is completely written and I am just editing, it will be updated on Fridays. I'm casting bearded Jude Law as poor Korsunsky, and Snoke is of course human in this Earth AU and looks like Andy Serkis did in Black Panther.  
> [Kylux Spotify Playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6YRMYaT5fte0cPWH5UVGW5?si=J3LTK6tkRyqlKb_taM7eHg)


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